Boston Confronts Jim Crow, 1890-1920

Boston
Confronts
Jim Crow

1890-1920

Mark R. Schneider

New foreword by Zebulon Vance Miletsky

Boston Confronts Jim Crow

BOSTON
CONFRONTS
JIM CROW

1890-1920

Mark R. Schneider

Northeastern University Press
BOSTON

Northeastern University Press 1997
Copyright © 1997 by Mark Schneider

New foreword copyright © 2019 by Zebulon Vance Miletsky

Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.

The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License:
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

ISBN 978-155553-884-2

Designed by Milenda Nan Ok Lee

Composed in Adobe Caslon by Coghill Composition in Richmond, Virginia.
Cover design for the Humanities Open Book edition by THINK BookWorks.

For Judith

Contents

Foreword to the Humanities Open Book Edition ix

Preface xiii

Acknowledgments xix

Introduction: What Kept Abolition Alive in Boston? 3

ONE The Federal Elections Bill of 1890

and Boston’s Upper Class 29

TWO Booker T. Washington and Boston’s

Black Upper Class 57

THREE Race, Gender, and Class: The Legacy of Lucy Stone 83

FOUR William Monroe Trotter: Bostonian 109

FIVE White Into Black: Boston’s NAACP, 1909-1920 133

SIX Irish-Americans and the Legacy of

John Boyle O’Reilly 161

SEVEN Life Experience and the Law:

The Cases of Holmes, Lewis, and Storey 187

Notes 213

Selected Bibliography 241

Index 251

Foreword to the

Humanities Open Book Edition

“Before Boston was born, it existed in the human imagination as a dream of
purity.” So begins Mark Robert Schneider’s Boston Confronts Jim Crow , 1890-
1920} Since its original publication in 1997, Boston Confronts Jim Crow has
become a staple in the ever-expanding matrix of analysis of the African-
American experience in Boston during the Progressive Era and at the dawn
of the twentieth century. Indeed, it has become the framework—the “eye of
the needle”—through which all other subsequent work has had to pass
through, even if that work focused on other time periods. Boston Confronts Jim
Crow was based on Schneider’s doctoral thesis in history at Boston College,
which was titled “Confronting Jim Crow: Boston’s Antislavery Tradition,
1890-1920.” It remains one of the most stimulating intellectual histories of
African-American thought in Boston, unparalleled in its task of examining
the conditions that made political protest, activism, and especially reform both
a possibility and a necessity in Boston.

Each chapter looks at a different “inheritor” of Boston’s abolitionist tradi¬
tion, including William Monroe Trotter, editor of the Guardian newspaper;
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin of the African-American women’s club move¬
ment; Butler Wilson of the Boston branch of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ol¬
iver Wendell Holmes; black attorney William Henry Lewis; NAACP presi-

x Foreword

dent and co-founder Moorfield Storey; John Boyle O'Reilly, Irish revolution¬
ary and poet; and Francis Jackson Garrison, local NAACP leader and son of
the fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. A chapter on the Federal Elec¬
tions Bill of 1890, which opens the study, profiles “Boston Brahmin” Repub¬
lican congressmen Henry Cabot Lodge and George Frisbie Hoar.

In so many ways, Boston Confronts Jim Crow was a direct heir of the work
of historian and author Stephen Fox, whose comprehensive biography of
William Monroe Trotter was the most complete articluation of Trotter’s
fascinating journey through the multiple worlds of journalism, leadership, and
intellectual thought—that is, until Schneider’s book offered up a singularly
captivating portrait of Trotter. 2 In so doing, he reminded us just how
important Trotter was in the larger conversation of racial thought in Boston—
as a founder of the Niagara movement, a direct forerunner of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—which
would eventually break the back of Jim Crow education in Boston.

When it comes to issues of race and social justice, one is often forced to
sift through myriad myths and notions about Boston. Boston Confronts Jim
Crow shows us that one will never be able to successfully come to a clear pic¬
ture of racial justice in Boston if one does not contend with the true essence
of its Jim Crow origins. 3 I discuss in much of my own work, namely in an
article that appeared in The Journal of Urban History , “Before Busing: Boston’s
Long Movement for Social Justice,” how Boston was the first in the nation to
codify separate but equal—what we would have to call Jim Crow segregation.
I argue there and in other work that any discussion of Boston must therefore
necessarily include the ways in which it was founded, and its corresponding
legacy of Jim Crow. 4

Schneider’s book was one of the first to focus on African Americans in
Boston in the early twentieth century—the moment at which Boston finds
itself at a racial crossroads. What kind of city is it going to become? Will
Boston follow its antislavery tradition, or acquiesce to the “South's violent
resubjugation of black Americans” as the North “elaborates its own version of
Jim Crow”? 5 At the heart of Boston’s racial history—and historigraphy—is
this question. Like the story of America, more broadly, the answer is, of
course, both. But we did not have a scholarly discourse, or framework, that
helped us to parse out, make sense of, or analyze this Boston paradox on race.
That is until a renaissance of studies of African Americans in Boston began

Foreword xi

to make their way to bookshelves in various forms in the 1990s—Adelaide M.
Cromwell’s The Other Brahmins: Boston s Black Upper Class, 1750-1950 being
one of them—which Schneider both cites and quotes consistently. 6

Recalling Schneider’s original dissertation subtitle, “Boston’s Antislavery
Tradition,” it is precisely this tradition which will be betrayed as the city
largely turns its back on the heroes and heroines that fill the pages of Schnei¬
der’s book. His work shows readers how Boston started down the path to be¬
coming what many would regard by the end of the twentieth century as one
of the most racist cities in America. The tension between its antebellum and
late modern narratives still exists today as Boston finds itself in a current reck¬
oning with not only its antislavery tradition but its own tradition of slavery.
Boston’s legacy of confronting Jim Crow endures. 7

Prior to Schneider’s book, both popular and scholarly attention had mainly
focused on either the nineteenth century as “the golden age” of the African-
American experience in the city, or the 1970s where Boston tore itself apart
over busing. 8 In the final analysis, perhaps Boston Confronts Jim Crow's most
lasting legacy is that it has provided a critically needed “bridge” between these
two highly contested time periods in Boston’s history. As such, Schneider’s
groundbreaking work blazed a new trail for scholars to reconstruct a more
accurate narrative—one that comes closer to mirroring the many paradoxes of
the African-American experience in Boston.

Zebulon Vance Miletsky
Stony Brook University

1 Schneider continues, “Its founder, John Winthrop, wrote that we shall be as a
City Upon a Hill,’ a New England, even before the first settlers abandoned the
old. Just as the original Puritans hoped to purge England of sin, so did their spir¬
itual heirs, two hundred years later, hope to purify America by purging it of slav¬
ery. Beginning as a small and despised band, the abolitionists lived to see their
goal accomplished within little more than a generation, but at the cost of a terrible
war. This book tells the story of how their spiritual descendants, both African-
American and white, continued their legacy.” Someone ought to write a book
about Schneider’s eloquence. For historical prose, it does not get more elegant.
Schneider’s grandiloquence continues throughout every page, including the last.

xii Foreword

We do not often remark upon these things in nonfiction writing, but I think ele¬
giac prose is worth praising.

2 Stephen R. Fox read and offered feedback of Schneider s chapter on Monroe
Trotter at the dissertation stage. He is thanked in the acknowledgments.

3 In the introduction to their legal anthology, Jim Crow in Boston: The Origin of
the Separate but Equal Doctrine , Leonard W. Levy and Douglas L. Jones write,
“The ‘separate but equal’ doctrine, the legal linchpin of Jim Crow in America, has
its origins in the cradle of liberty, Boston, Massachusetts.” Referring to the case
of Roberts v. City of Boston (1849), in which Benjamin Roberts sued the city in
1846 on behalf of his daughter Sarah, who had to pass by five primary schools to
get to the Abiel Smith Grammar School, the only school in the city that admitted
African-American children, Levy and Douglas point out an irony that has largely
been forgotten or covered up by the myths about Boston.

4 Miletsky, Zebulon Vance. “Before Busing: Boston’s Long Movement for Civil
Rights and the Legacy of Jim Crow in the ‘Cradle of Liberty.’” Journal of Urban
History 43, no. 2 (March 2017): 204-17.

5 Fields, Karen E. The Journal of American History 85, no. 2 (1998): 706-07.

6 Cromwell, Adelaide M. The Other Brahmins: Bostons Black Upper Class , 1750-
1950. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994.

7 Seelye, Katharine Ch "Boston Grapples with Faneuil Hall, Named for a Slave¬
holder." The New York Times, June 6, 2018.

8 Since 1997, several other works have been published that focus quite effectively
on the period between the antebellum era and the 1970s, including Davison M.
Douglas’s Jim Crow Moves North: The Battle Over Northern School Segregation ,
1865-1954 (Cambridge University Press, 2005); Stephen and Paul Kendrick’s Sa¬
rah's Long Walk: The Free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality
Changed America (Beacon Press, 2006); Stephen David Kantrowitz’s More Than
Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic , 1829-1889 (Penguin,
2012); and Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood’s Race over Party: Black Politics
and Partisanship in Late Nineteenth- Century Boston (University of North Carolina
Press, 2018).

Preface

“The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line,”
W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in the forethought to The Souls of Black Folk in
1903. 1 Nowhere was that crucial American dilemma more earnestly addressed
between 1890 and 1920 than in Boston. During these thirty years, white su¬
premacists of varying stripes denied African-Americans their civil and politi¬
cal rights, segregated them socially, exploited them economically, and
enforced the new order by means of increasingly public violence. This study
discusses what Bostonians did as the white South drew a rigid color line
through its society, and the white North greeted its African-American mi¬
grants with paternalism at best and violence at worst. It seeks to discover the
sources of their ideas and actions in the unique antislavery tradition of the
city.

Boston remained a singular place in its attitude toward race relations dur¬
ing this period, producing important national leaders for the reform move¬
ment. Although I have not attempted to compare Boston to New York,
Chicago, Philadelphia, or other northern cities, the special role of Bostonians
in the country as a whole should become obvious . 2 In a general sense, the city
did follow the pattern of increasing hostility toward new black residents and
indifference to the new order in the South. Boston, however, as the home of
abolition, had too great an investment in its past to follow the national trend
entirely. African-Americans and antiracist whites were proud of their city
throughout this period, and between 1890 and 1920 they urged their fellow
Americans to live up to Bostons best traditions.

On the national level, the question of the endurance of the abolitionist
legacy has been most thoughtfully addressed by James M. McPherson, author
of two outstanding books on this subject . 3 In the introduction to the second

xiv Preface

volume, The Abolitionist Legacy, he wrote that he “challenge[d] the prevailing
assumption that most abolitionists abandoned the battle for Negro rights
after 1870.” He compiled a table of 284 first-, second-, and third-generation
abolitionists and traced their responses to the erosion of civil rights between
1870 and 1909, the year the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People was founded. Even those who backed away from the full civil
rights program maintained their long-term perspective by contributing to
the education of the freedpeople. The present study affirms McPherson’s
conclusion that on the whole, the dwindling group of race reformers backed
full citizenship rights for African-Americans.

The interracial minority that carried forward the antislavery heritage was
small but significant. 4 Boston’s compact African-American community was
particularly militant. It produced national leadership in the person of William
Monroe Trotter and his outspoken Guardian newspaper; Mrs. Josephine St.
Pierre Ruffin of the African-American women’s club movement; and Butler
and Mary Wilson of the National Association for the Advancement of Col¬
ored People. White activists such as civil rights attorney Moorfield Storey,
Irish revolutionary and poet John Boyle O’Reilly, and NAACP leader Francis
Jackson Garrison, youngest son of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, an¬
chored themselves in the reform tradition that began in the 1830s. These
people drew their inspiration in part from Boston’s intellectual and political
heritage.

Of course, not all Bostonians of this era who acted upon American race
relations consistently defended notions of equality for African-Americans.
Republican politicians like Henry Cabot Lodge and George Frisbie Hoar led
the congressional fight for the Federal Elections bill of 1890 that would pro¬
tect black voters, but shortly afterward Lodge especially became disillusioned
with the possibility for progress. Attorney William Henry Lewis, a supporter
of Booker T. Washington, kept silent in the face of injustice, hoping to win
political advancement. Women’s suffrage advocate Henry Blackwell did not
uphold the views of his wife Lucy Stone, when he proposed that the votes of
“respectable” women would counterbalance the votes of blacks and immi¬
grants. Nor could Irish-American leaders like Patrick J. Maguire or Cardinal
William Henry O’Connell remain true to the legacy of John Boyle O’Reilly.
On the U.S. Supreme Court, the rulings of Oliver Wendell Holmes were
decidedly tepid on questions of civil rights. These people embraced Boston’s
antislavery tradition with varying degrees of ambivalence, at different mo¬
ments in their careers.

That tradition was itself created by Bostonians of the Gilded Age and
Progressive Era. In the aftermath of the Civil War, they built statues and

Preface xv

sang odes to those who championed the rights of the slaves and freedpeople.
William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner and the African-
American veterans of the Massachusetts 54th and 55th Regiments were cele¬
brated by Boston mayors, state governors, and schoolchildren. From our more
distant perspective we can appreciate that Boston’s legacy included conserva¬
tives who feared to antagonize the South or cared nothing about the slaves,
as well as reformers. The Boston of our period, however, constructed a myth
of itself, and a not entirely fictitious one either, as a bastion of freedom. All
socially conscious Bostonians had to reckon with the meaning of that myth
as they confronted Jim Crow.

We follow the narrative by examining the work of leaders who left a paper
trail. It is therefore a political and intellectual history that relies upon tradi¬
tional historical source material: newspapers, books, correspondence, judicial
and legislative debate. As all historians of race relations know, this trail is
more difficult to follow through the African-American community. Boston’s
black community newspapers—the Courant (1890s, virtually disappeared), the
Chronicle (begun 1916 but unavailable in early years), and the Guardian (begun
1901, and available only in random numbers)—provide a very spotty record
for this period. The journal of the Woman’s Era Club is not available in its
entirety. Manuscript collections scarcely exist and those that do are incom¬
plete. There is a complete set of the Colored American Magazine and Alexan¬
ders Magazine , both literary and political monthlies that together span the
years from 1900 to 1909. For the white activists, much more has been pre¬
served.

The actors here are grouped together in part by profession, in part by
political orientation, and in part by chronology. While this makes for a cer¬
tain amount of repetition—both Trotter and the NAACP, for example,
fought separately to ban the movie The Birth of a Nation —I hope it has
facilitated thematic clarity. In this form of organization I have been influ¬
enced by Arthur Mann’s Yankee Reformers in the Urban Age , which discusses
various groups of Boston reformers . 5

A selective discussion inevitably raises a question in the mind of the reader,
Why is this person included, but not that? Indeed, a case could be made that
such important local figures as ward boss Martin Lomasney, Harvard profes¬
sor William James, and Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis deserve to be
considered in a study such as this. My guideline was to find representative
types who acted on the race problem in this period, rather than to attempt a
comprehensive summary. For better or worse, Irish Democrat John F. Fitz¬
gerald stands in for Lomasney, Harvard president Charles W. Eliot for

xvi Preface

James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes for Brandeis. Further, I have included
state residents from nearby cities, especially Cambridge.

In his introduction to The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on
Afro-American Character and Destiny , 1817-1914, George M. Fredrickson urges
future historians to avoid introducing the color line into their own discourse
and organization of text . 6 I have tried to follow his advice. This study dis¬
cusses politicians, lawyers, suffragists, Irish-Americans, and supporters of
Booker Washington, Monroe Trotter, and the NAACP. In each case I have
tried to “integrate” the discussion racially. Most of these groupings included
people of both races; even in discussing Irish leaders of Boston’s Democratic
Party, Catholic Church, or trade union movement, I have tried not to neglect
African-American Democratic voters, Catholic parishioners, or workers.

Periodizations for historical studies are necessarily arbitrary; a case may
always be made for moving one’s dates backward or forward in the stream of
events. Nevertheless, 1890 marks an important turning point in American
race relations. In that year, Massachusetts Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge
and Senator George Frisbie Hoar led a fight to protect African-American
voting rights in the South. The defeat of that campaign in January 1891
marked the collapse of northern Republican concern for civil rights. In 1890,
Mississippi effectively disfranchised its African-American voters at a consti¬
tutional convention that heralded a southern trend. That year, too, a divided
woman’s suffrage movement reunited, and New England suffragists argued
that votes for women could help assure white supremacy in the South. In
August 1890, John Boyle O’Reilly died, silencing the voice of the nation’s
outstanding Irish-born supporter of African-American rights. Thirty years
later, segregation and disfranchisement were firmly established throughout
the South. African-Americans had endured persecution by Presidents Theo¬
dore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and had been mobbed by racists in
the North and lynched in the South. Nevertheless, the experience of the
World War and the Great Migration northward contributed to the appear¬
ance of a “New Negro” by 1920. The NAACP leadership that year passed
into the hands of James Weldon Johnson, an African-American; thousands
of Marcus Garvey supporters demonstrated their Negro nationalism in the
North; and in 1919 African-American citizens fought back when attacked by
white mobs. A new self confidence marked the appearance of the New Negro,
soon to be celebrated in the arts by the Harlem Renaissance.

A few words on terminology. This book is about the antislavery tradition
in the broad sense. First, I have made no attempt to distinguish between
abolitionists, who advocated the immediate end to slavery, and antislavery
people who may have desired this, but publicly advocated only its contain-

Preface xvii

ment. 7 By 1890, the distinction had lost its force; the antiracists of our period
were faced with a new set of questions. Second, when narrating, I use the
contemporary terms “African-American” and “black” in the text. However,
when summarizing the words of others, I have remained faithful to the his¬
torical context and employed the terms that the speakers or writers would
have used: often that term is “colored American”; sometimes it is “Negro.”
Finally, I have used the term “Jim Crow” generically to stand for the varying
aspects of race discrimination, rather than to denote segregation.

The people in this story grappled with the knot of American race relations
at a time when white supremacists were pulling the ropes ever more tightly
about the entire society. Probably the most significant accomplishment of the
Bostonians was to build the NAACP, the sword that ultimately cleaved the
legal tangle. Along with those who never joined it, but contributed in their
own fashion to the undoing of racial inequality, the heirs of Bostons best
traditions provided a vital link to the modern civil rights movement. Those
who confront our contemporary form of Jim Crow society may recognize
something of themselves in these characters from the nadir of African-Amer¬
ican history.

This study is rooted in the history of Boston and its African-American
community, but it does not purport to recount those stories. In particular,
much is left out here that pertains to Boston’s African-American history in
this period: the life of its institutions such as churches and fraternal lodges,
and much of the social history of its average citizens. The focus is on the
political and intellectual lives of activists as they looked outward at the race
relations of the nation as a whole, and how they relied upon their sense of
the past.

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the counsel and unfailingly
good cheer of Andrew Buni, who supported it in its earliest stages. Karen
Miller and Alan Lawson questioned various assumptions I made and contrib¬
uted constructive criticism in good measure. Stephen R. Fox generously cor¬
rected substantive and stylistic errors in the chapter on Monroe Trotter.
Those errors that remain throughout the text, of course, are all mine.

At Northeastern University Press, John Weingartner patiently steered the
manuscript through the maze of the publishing process. My close friend,
Seth Wigderson of the University of Maine at Augusta, offered encourage¬
ment and advice along the way. Judith Periale provided indispensable assis¬
tance with the final manuscript preparation.

Thanks are also due to the staffs of the various libraries and historical
societies listed in the bibliography. Virginia H. Smith of the Massachusetts
Historical Society, Esme Bhan of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center
of Howard University, and the workers at the microfilm department at the
Boston Public Library were particularly helpful.

Most of all, Judith Beth Cohen reminded me to enjoy myself through¬
out this project, and provided the love and happiness that helped me to com¬
plete it.

Boston Confronts Jim Crow

Phillips School, Boston, Massachusetts, ca. 1897 . Courtesy of the Society for the
Preservation of New England Antiquities.

INTRODUCTION

4r*T*T*T*T*'

What Kept Abolition
Alive in Boston?

Before Boston was born, it existed in the human imagination as a dream
of purity. Its founder, John Winthrop, wrote that “we shall be as a City upon
a Hill,” a New England, even before the first settlers abandoned the old. Just
as the original Puritans hoped to purge England of sin, so did their spiritual
heirs, two hundred years later, hope to purify America by purging it of slav¬
ery. Beginning as a small and despised band, the abolitionists lived to see
their goal accomplished within little more than a generation, but at the cost
of a terrible war. This book tells the story of how their spiritual descendants,
both African-American and white, continued their legacy.

This small group of Bostonians played a unique role in American life be¬
tween 1890 and 1920 as national leaders in the fight against Jim Crow. While
there were other activists like them throughout the country, they alone felt a
special responsibility because of their own city's history. To understand why
this was so, we must address three broad questions. First, who were Boston’s
African-Americans, and what made their community different from others
in the North? Second, what was the connection between the city’s history
and its race reformers of the day, and what was Boston like between 1890 and
1920? Third, what were the national trends that encouraged the establishment
of the Jim Crow system, and what did that system entail? 1

AFRICAN-AMERICAN BOSTON, 1890-1920

African-American Bostonians tended to be more politically radical than their
contemporaries for a variety of reasons. The demographics of the black com¬
munity there help explain this radicalism. Although Boston was largely unaf¬
fected by the Great Migration to the North during World War I, half the

4 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

city’s black people were southern migrants for much of this period. These
new arrivals were well suited to urban life and eager to advance economically,
but, like second- or third-generation residents, they found their way forward
blocked by race discrimination. At the same time, they felt themselves to be
more free than other African-Americans. The small size of the black commu¬
nity insulated it from the more blatant forms of racism that afflicted other
urban centers. In addition, a divided and exclusive upper class, the class that
provided the basis for accommodation in other northern centers, was too
weak to dominate the political life of the community. Finally, black Bosto¬
nians developed their own community institutions, enjoyed a favorable politi¬
cal climate, and had a proud history of resistance to oppression. These factors
combined to make Boston a hotbed of African-American militance.

Boston’s black population grew from 8,125 1890 to 16,350 1920, dou¬

bling in size over thirty years. Nevertheless, in 1890 Boston’s African-Ameri¬
cans comprised only 1.8 percent of the total population, and only 2.2 percent
by 1920. Across the Charles River, Cambridge in 1920 was 4.9 percent black
with 5,334 residents. Together the two cities contributed about half the state’s
total African-American population of 45,466. The next largest community in
Massachusetts was New Bedford, with 4,998 African-Americans, followed by
Springfield (2,650), Worcester (1,258), and a remainder spread around the
state. In the Boston metropolitan area Chelsea, West Medford, Everett and
a few other towns had small black communities as well. 2

Statistically, Boston’s black population was insignificant in relation to the
national African-American population. The vast majority of African-Ameri¬
cans between 1890 and 1920 lived in the South. In 1920, roughly 8,911,000 of
America’s 10,463,131 total African-American population could be found in
the South and West South Central states. Only 79,051 lived in all of New
England, less than 1 percent of the total nationally. While black people com¬
prised 9.9 percent of the population nationally, they were only 2.2 percent in
Boston. 3

Boston’s black population was small in total numbers relative even to other
northern cities. Boston as a whole was the fifth-largest city in 1890 and sev¬
enth nationally in 1920, with 748,060 residents in the latter year. Boston
ranked twenty-seventh in black population that year. By contrast, 152,467
African-Americans lived in New York, nearly ten times Boston’s figure. Phil¬
adelphia was home to 134,229 black people and Chicago and Washington,
D.C., had more than 109,000. Nevertheless, Boston’s 2.2 percent black popu¬
lation figure in 1920 was not far behind New York’s 2.7 percent or Chicago’s
4.1 percent, but significantly behind Philadelphia’s 7.4 percent. 4

This population inhabited the new African-American community that

Introduction 5

formed in the South End and Lower Roxbury districts from about 1890 on¬
ward. The earliest black community in Boston centered in the Copp’s Hill
area of the North End along the waterfront where the men worked as steve¬
dores, laborers, and sailors. As Boston merchants built their fortunes in the
carrying trade, they moved to Beacon Hill, and African-Americans followed,
occupying the north and west slopes. There they worked as house servants,
waiters, laborers, or artisans. By 1900, an increasing Jewish migration to this
area, now called the West End, caused many residents to move toward the
South End, where southern black migrants were locating. Between 1900 and
1910 the older neighborhood decreased in size by 50 percent. In 1920 7,319
African-Americans, about half the city’s total, inhabited the South End’s
Ward 13. In two adjoining wards lived another 4,899 African-Americans.
Cambridgeport, not far from the South End, became the center of Cam¬
bridge’s community of color. By 1920 the South End formed the core of a
growing metropolitan African-American community. 5

While Boston’s black population was increasingly grouped in one geo¬
graphic area, that neighborhood was racially integrated. New immigrants,
especially from czarist Russia and southern Europe, also located in the South
End. Ward 13, in which 45 percent of the city’s blacks lived in 1920, was only
28 percent black and Ward 7, with 22 percent, was only 9.9 percent African-
American. Thus two-thirds of Boston’s black citizens resided in an integrated
setting, and the remainder dwelled in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods.
There were particular clusters of black neighborhoods within the South
End—for example the area around Back Bay station where many Pullman
porters lived—and there were places in which blacks shared tenement build¬
ings with Jews, Germans, or Irish. African-American children attended inte¬
grated schools, usually constituting less than 10 percent of the student body.
Black Bostonians lived in a core neighborhood that was a community, not a
ghetto. 6

The small size of this community, both in population and geography,
probably encouraged its political militance. The black population offered no
serious economic competition to whites, who fought among themselves along
ethnic lines for jobs. Nor did issues regarding use of physical space arise in
this period, as we shall next observe. The small scale meant that activist
leaders could easily know and communicate with one another. At the same
time, the community was large enough so that meetings of protest or celebra¬
tion could fill Faneuil Hall or the Twelfth Baptist Church, and the partici¬
pants could feel the strength of their numbers. 7

Compared to other African-Americans nationally, even to other northern¬
ers, Bostonians probably worried less about white violence. They moved

6 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

about the city without fear of attack. They had a proud and officially cele¬
brated history. Politically they were well represented in city and state govern¬
ment until the turn of the century. Gradually, however, these advantages
slowly eroded, as race relations deteriorated nationally. Nevertheless, black
Bostonians remained proud of their city, probably until at least 1915, when
they failed to prevent the showing of the film, The Birth of a Nation.

Between 1890 and 1920, many northern cities or their environs were the
scenes of violence against African-Americans, especially after the Great Mi¬
gration. These included New York and Akron, Ohio, in 1900; Springfield,
Illinois, in 1908; Coatesville, Pennsylvania, in 1911; East St. Louis in 1917; and
Chicago and Washington, D.C., in 1919. Bostons African-Americans were
never victims of racial violence during this time. 8

In 1910, the prize fight between African-American Jack Johnson and the
“Great White Hope” Jim Jeffries provided a litmus test of race relations na¬
tionally. Men gathered in huge downtown crowds to hear announcers read
blow-by-blow descriptions of the fight from a ticker tape. When Johnson
defeated Jeffries, cities throughout the country erupted in racial violence, pro¬
ducing thousands of injuries and eight deaths. Gangs of hoodlums beat up
black people in New York, and in the nation’s capital hundreds of African-
Americans were arrested. Nothing of this sort transpired in Boston. The fight
took place on 4 July, when for the first time in the city’s history, an African-
American, James H. Wolff, delivered Boston’s official Independence Day
oration. While black Bostonians basked in Wolff’s reflected glory, a mostly
white crowd of 10,000 gathered in increasing gloom to hear of Johnson’s
victory. Only one minor racial confrontation occurred. 9

Central public space was not circumscribed by race hatred. Bostonians had
a long tradition of using Faneuil Hall as a meeting place for protest gather¬
ings. This symbolic downtown structure was located between the West and
South Ends, and black people showed their self-confidence by appropriating
this race-neutral space without fear. On one occasion, activists organized
marches from both neighborhoods to Faneuil Hall. During the 1915 protests
against the film The Birth of a Nation , black people picketed the movie the¬
ater, and massed at the State House and on Boston Common. 10

Time and again, prominent African-American Bostonians testified to the
favorable racial climate of the city. When Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin orga¬
nized a national conference of African-American women in 1895, she declared
that only Boston had a suitable “atmosphere” for such a meeting. Susie King
Taylor, a slave from Savannah, escaped to Union lines during the Civil War
and made her way to Boston. In 1902 she recalled her experiences: “I have
been in many states and cities, and in each I have looked for liberty and

Introduction 7

justice, equal for the black as for the white, but it was not until I was within
the borders of New England, and reached old Massachusetts, that I found
it.” In May 1904, the Colored American Magazine reprinted a Boston Sunday
Herald article titled “Boston as the Paradise of the Negro,” in which several
prominent black Bostonians testified to this sanguine view of the city's racial
climate. Editor William Monroe Trotter concurred when he invited his sup¬
porters to attend the 1911 convention of his National Independent Political
League convention. “Welcome to the Home of Abolition,” his Guardian
newspaper enthused, “where it is no crime to be black.” 11

Once a southern politician expressed the same idea, but with opposite
sentiments. When an Arkansas African-American was convicted of assault
with intent to kill in 1902, he was sentenced to three years in prison. Arkansas
Governor Jefferson Davis, returning home after a sojourn in Massachusetts,
pardoned the convict under the condition that he relocate to the Bay State.
The governor heard “many expressions of sympathy by the citizens of Massa¬
chusetts for what they were pleased to call the poor oppressed negro of the
south,” and he now would give the Bostonians “the opportunity to reform

»i -)

one. 12

If this favorable racial climate surpassed that of other cities, contemporary
observers and most later students of the period agree that racial feeling was
nontheless increasing in Boston. Ray Stannard Baker, the celebrated progres¬
sive journalist, noticed Boston’s shift in sentiment in his 1908 account of
national race relations. John Daniels, a white social worker at the South End’s
settlement for southern black migrants, the Robert Gould Shaw House, pub¬
lished the most comprehensive account of the issue in 1914, after working
nine years on his manuscript. He set the date of decline at about 1895, citing
the passage of a state civil rights bill two years earlier as the high point, and
the redistricting of the city in 1895 to the disadvantage of black voters as the
turning point. Adelaide Cromwell Hill, writing in 1952, placed the beginning
of the period of decline at about 1910-15, associating the problem with chang¬
ing power relations among the whites and the failure of black leaders to
integrate southern migrants into the community. Richard A. Ballou surveyed
the existing literature in 1984 and concluded that Boston and Cleveland had
the best racial climate nationally, but that around the turn of the century
white attitudes began to harden. 13

At the top of Boston’s African-American community was an upper class
that, according to Willard B. Gatewood, “had a reputation for exclusiveness
that went even beyond that of those in Washington or Philadelphia.”
Wealthy men such as the merchant tailor John H. Lewis and the baker Joseph
Lee, distinguished old-line families of less means like the Ruffins, Ridleys,

8 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

Duprees, Haydens, and others formed part of this circle. Professionals like
doctor Samuel Courtney, editor William Monroe Trotter, and lawyers Clem¬
ent Morgan, William Henry Lewis, or Butler Wilson also counted. They
established a genteel way of life complete with white servants, vacations on
Martha’s Vineyard, musical training for children, and membership in select
clubs that were modeled on those of white society. 14

However, this upper class could not lead the community, as we shall see in
greater detail when we examine Booker T. Washington’s support. Some of
its members were socially conservative businessmen who believed that hard
work and market forces would bring their own rewards. These people joined
the National Negro Business League, which was nonpolitical. They had more
links to white society than similar groups in other cities. While they estab¬
lished social clubs of their own, they also patronized the Boston Symphony
Orchestra or similar institutions; some even depended economically on white
clients. Comprising perhaps 2 percent of the community, the more conserva¬
tive among them held aloof from the popular classes, and they had no real
political base.

The vast majority of Boston and Cambridge’s 22,000 African-Americans
in 1920 were unskilled laborers, working as janitors, domestic servants, por¬
ters, or laundresses. This was true both of people whose ancestors were Bos¬
tonians, and of recent arrivals from the South. Very few were able to escape
from poverty by obtaining better-paying jobs as factory operatives, entering
the professions, or starting their own business. In contrast, Irish-Americans
and new immigrants from czarist Russia or southern Europe did advance
economically in this period and afterward. 15

Using sophisticated statistical techniques, Stephan Thernstrom has argued
persuasively that second-generation black Bostonians fared no better than
recent arrivals, and that they fell behind second-generation Irish workers dur¬
ing the period we are considering. “Probably the most significant feature of
the economic plight of blacks in Boston,” Thernstrom concluded, “was their
lack of access to blue-collar jobs above the most menial level.” By 1890 the
Irish were well advanced in the construction trades, and proportionate to
their population were four times better represented there than African-
Americans. Semiskilled jobs in public transportation or even the shoe indus¬
try were relatively closed to black Bostonians regardless of longevity in
Boston. 16

Elizabeth Pleck showed that race discrimination was the cause of this eco¬
nomic failure. Theoretically, white employers should have hired blacks as the
cheapest labor available, but the labor market did not function in a race-
neutral manner to provide equal access to jobs for African-Americans. Pleck

Introduction 9

writes: “Urban employers, workers, and unions helped to perpetuate [black
poverty] by erecting two major, distinct racial barriers, exclusion and unsuc¬
cessful competition.” Employers excluded black workers for fear that white
workers would refuse to work alongside them. White workers also combined
to keep African-Americans out of skilled crafts and wrote exclusionary agree¬
ments into union bylaws. Blacks suffered “unsuccessful competition” when
white consumers and business competitors forced them out of some semi¬
skilled trades, such as barbering, by combining in a race-conscious way to
compete against them. Some artisans who were second-generation black Bos¬
tonians lost their workshops or trades in this manner to European immigrant
artisans. 17

Boston African-Americans were not able to escape the working class by
establishing their own businesses. Pleck identified 197 black business concerns
in 1900, but 107 of these were in the personal service category, which involved
very small amounts of start-up capital. Moreover, 63 percent of African-
American enterprises failed between 1880 and 1890, and 53 percent between
1890 and 1900. By contrast, only 27 percent of Irish-owned businesses failed
in Boston during the earlier period. Pleck attributes the disparity to the
greater access to capital that the Irish had. Contrasting the high rate of Afri¬
can-American business failure to the lower rate suffered by Chinese immi¬
grants, she suggested that the Chinese organized revolving credit pools and
regulated competition among themselves, while African-Americans did not.
Why this organization occurred is beyond the scope of this discussion; what
matters is that black Bostonians rarely moved out of the working class. 18

A remarkably high percentage of Boston’s black population were migrants
from the South. In 1890, they constituted 46 percent of the total population;
in 1900, 53 percent; and in 1930 (the next date for which figures are avail¬
able), 37 percent. John Daniels argued that these southern migrants, unlike
long-term Boston residents, gave offense to white Bostonians by their rural
manners and uncouth behavior. There may have been some truth to this
observation by a contemporary but paternalist reporter. However, as Daniels
himself recorded, many of these newcomers came with lofty ambitions, hop¬
ing to educate themselves and their children, and many did. 19

Pleck showed that these migrants were actually a select group who were
well prepared for northern urban life. They came largely from Tidewater
cities, especially in Virginia. Motivated in part by declining economic oppor¬
tunities, they came to Boston hoping to rise financially and educationally.
They followed a pattern of chain migration and maintenance of kinship ties
that pulled them to Boston. Most Virginia out-migrants traveled only the
shorter distance to Philadelphia or New York, which offered similar job op-

io Boston Confronts Jim Crow

portunities. This suggests that the smaller number who came to Boston had
a specific reason for bypassing the other seacoast cities; they probably had
relatives already there or some other specific reason for choosing Boston.
Pleck found them to be more urban, literate, mulatto and Upper South in
origin than most southern blacks. Those who had been slaves also might have
had some industrial experience, unlike most former plantation workers. Peter
Randolph, born a slave in the Virginia Tidewater in 1825, an d ^ ater minister
of Boston’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, was a key leader of the migrant com¬
munity in the South End. Randolph discouraged emotional southern reli¬
gious practices and helped acculturate new arrivals to the more reserved
behavior of Boston. Pleck’s portrait of the southern migrants is of “a clannish
culture” that had the potential and desire to advance socially and economi¬
cally, but was blocked by discrimination. 20

Boston’s African-American community also included a small West Indian
population. In 1910 they numbered 566 people; by 1920 the prospect of better
jobs had swelled their numbers to 2,877, or about 19 percent of the total
black population. Most of these were working-class people with middle-class
aspirations. By 1916, they launched their own newspaper, the Boston Chronicle .
Many were Catholics or Episcopalians; although they maintained their island
culture, they did not form a distinct neighborhood within the South End.
Many men had been construction workers in the West Indies, but were
barred from their trade by lily-white unions in Boston, and found themselves
downwardly mobile. There is little evidence that they flocked to the message
of Marcus Garvey, the New York-based leader of the nationalist Universal
Negro Improvement Association. 21

Progressive Era observers John Daniels and Frederic Bushee showed that
black Bostonians endured more hardship than whites in the areas of death
and disease, housing, education, and criminality. Historian Peter C. Holloran
examined social services for destitute children over the century from 1830 to
1930. Taken as a whole, they present a mixed picture of paternalist reformers
addressing complex social problems with varying degrees of success.

Boston’s African-Americans died more often from fatal infectious diseases
than their white fellow citizens. Tuberculosis in particular afflicted black Bos¬
tonians more relentlessly than whites. Between 1900 and 1910 the black birth
and death rate was balanced at 25.4 per thousand, but while the white birth
rate equaled the black, whites died at a rate of only 18.7 per thousand. The
increase in the black population in these years was due to migration rather
than natural increase.

Housing was worse for black people. Although their population density
was not worse than that of whites throughout the city, African-Americans

Introduction n

more frequently inhabited tenement housing or alley buildings with poor
light and ventilation. Bushee ascribed this situation to defects in African-
American character. Daniels’s picture of limited economic possibilities sug¬
gests, rather, that poverty forced the poor into poor housing, and he also saw
a trend toward improvement in this area.

Joined to this advance was the positive use that black Bostonians made of
the public schools. Daniels introduced as a ‘‘typical instance” the case of a
Georgia migrant family who arrived in Boston between 1897 and 1899 spe¬
cifically so the six children could attend school, which they did successfully.
African-American children performed as well as their fellow students, but
poverty forced more black children to quit school to take up employment.
Some of those who stayed in school achieved honors, and six African-Ameri¬
cans taught in the schools. The less sanguine Bushee, without presenting
evidence, thought African-Americans paid less heed to education than white
ethnic groups. Neither used comparative statistics for other cities. In 1920,
2.6 percent of black Bostonians over the age of twenty-one were illiterate in
a city with 5 percent illiteracy as a whole. This figure is deceptive by itself,
for only .1 percent of native-born white adults were illiterate, but 10.5 percent
of foreign-born whites were illiterate. In New York, 2.3 percent of all black
people were illiterate; in Philadelphia, 5.4 percent; Chicago, 4.5 percent; and
Washington, 10.7 percent. Black Bostonians, therefore, were less literate than
native-born whites but more literate than the foreign-born; compared to
other northern African-Americans they were more literate than most.

Boston’s African-Americans were not more inclined to pauperism or reli¬
ance upon charity than whites. Daniels noted the limited use of public and
private charity by black people. Historian Peter Holloran, writing seventy
years later, uncovered a spotty record of service for black orphans. He found
that African-Americans maintained their own social services through kinship
networks. When these failed, orphans were served by white church-based
services, some of which were integrated and some segregated. Bushee agreed
that there were few African-American paupers, but thought the statistics
masked more cases of semi-dependency. In 1900, Daniels wrote, 76 percent
of African-American Bostonians were gainfully employed and 65 percent of
white men; 40 percent of black women worked and 24 percent of white
women. This higher employment rate, which included children, showed that
African-Americans had to leave school earlier to find work.

In the area of crime, Daniels found that 3.3 percent of all state penitentiary
inmates were black when the state was only 1.1 percent African-American.
Given the legacy of slavery and employment discrimination, Daniels interpre-

12 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

ted this figure to be low. Bushee used city jail figures from the 1890s to argue
that African-Americans were inclined toward criminality and drunkenness. 22

Despite these economic and social disabilities, African-American Bosto¬
nians possessed an impressive array of community institutions at the turn of
the century, and they would continue to build new ones to meet future needs.
The most important of these was the church. The First African Baptist
Church dates to 1805, and was followed by a separate Methodist Church in
1818, two African Methodist Episcopal churches (1833 and 1838), and another
Baptist church in 1840. After the Civil War, African-Americans founded
important Congregational and Episcopal churches. Black Bostonians started
the first separate Masonic Lodge, the Prince Hall chapter, in 1787, when they
were refused admission to the Grand Lodge along with whites. African-
American women in Boston had several community-based clubs, the most
important of which was the Woman’s Era Club founded in 1893 by Josephine
St. Pierre Ruffin. In 1900, Booker Washington launched his National Negro
Business League in Boston. Professional African-Americans formed two sep¬
arate literary societies, one in the West End and one in the South End.
During the period under consideration, black Bostonians published at least
four newspapers—the Courant , Womans Era , Guardian , and Chronicle —and
two magazines, the Colored American Magazine and Alexander s. These insti¬
tutions provided a framework in which people could construct their lives, and
fight for their rights. 23

Moreover, these institutions were rooted in the collective memory of an
heroic past. The antislavery traditions of white Boston contributed to the
self-confidence of Boston’s African-Americans. In defense of their rights,
they could appeal to their special heritage as Bostonians and argue that the
denial of equality to African-Americans contradicted the city’s rhetorical
commitment to equal rights. Black Bostonians in the antebellum period won
a remarkable degree of political freedom and racial integration. Massachu¬
setts African-Americans more rapidly than others eradicated slavery, won the
right to vote, integrated the public schools and accommodations, defended
fugitive slaves, and contributed troops during the Civil War.

While the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 laid the groundwork for the
abolition of slavery within the state, it was an African-American’s lawsuit
that definitively ended the practice. Quock Walker, arguing that his deceased
master had freed him in his will, won his case in the state Supreme Judicial
Court in 1783, dealing slavery a mortal blow. The Constitution made no men¬
tion of race, and black men could vote. 24

In the pre-William Lloyd Garrison era, when interracial social mixing or
political fraternization was taboo, black Bostonians built their own social

Introduction 13

institutions. David Walker and John Hilton founded the General Colored
Association of Massachusetts in 1826 to oppose slavery. Walker, a North Car¬
olina freedman, distributed the country’s first African-American newspaper,
Freedoms Journal, published in New York. He worshiped at Samuel Snow¬
den’s African-Methodist Episcopal Church, and made his living selling sec¬
ondhand clothes in the community. Walker probably lived his life completely
among African-Americans. His pamphlet, the “Appeal,” justified slave rebel¬
lion, condemned white religious and educational leaders for keeping blacks
in ignorance, and attacked the American Colonization Society for seeking to
deport them to Africa. 25

The abolitionist movement led by William Lloyd Garrison greatly ex¬
panded the possibilities for African-American political action. Its newspaper,
The Liberator, had a mostly black subscription base during the 1830s, and also
functioned as a community journal. For the first time, the races worked to¬
gether in the New England Anti-Slavery Society, and African-American
Garrisonians such as Boston’s William Cooper Nell and Salem’s John Lenox
Remond achieved great authority in their community. When Frederick
Douglass lived in Lynn, Massachusetts, in the early 1840s, he inaugurated a
successful campaign to desegregate the railroads. Encouraged by white allies,
black activists in Massachusetts eradicated legal segregation and thus weak¬
ened racist attitudes. 26

The movement to desegregate the public schools struck a powerful blow
against Negrophobia. If schoolchildren could be educated together, that
would show that African-Americans were human beings entitled to equal
rights, and worthy of being treated as social equals. School integration would
cast slavery in a more harsh light than any propaganda, because it would
demonstrate in life that the slaves were fully human. William Cooper Nell,
whose father had worked with David Walker, set out to achieve this goal as
a youth. He joined with the Garrisonians, and led a long crusade through the
school boards and courts to desegregate the schools. This campaign included
a boycott of the African school that a minority of the community endorsed.
Nell triumphed in 1855 when the state legislature outlawed segregated educa¬
tion. That year he published Colored Patriots of the Revolution, which showed
the contributions of African-Americans to the struggle against Great Britain.
Nell s career, and the defeat of segregation, gave lasting impetus to the notion
that African-Americans deserved full equality to whites. 27

The struggle for integration and the close alliance of Boston’s black activ¬
ists with Garrison at once encouraged and retarded the development of sepa¬
rate institutions. Unlike black New Yorkers or Philadelphians, Bostonians
held back from the convention movement of the antebellum period, but some

14 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

black Garrisonians supported the movement. While they opposed separate
institutions such as manual training schools or separate public schools, they
did encourage separate self-improvement societies such as the Boston Minors
Exhibition Society and the Boston Female Benevolent and Intelligence Soci¬
ety. Nevertheless, the prevailing Garrisonian view was that separate institu¬
tions were a concession to racism. 28

On the other hand, by the 1850s many black Garrisonians broke with their
leaders precepts regarding political action and nonresistance. The climate
that Garrison created by socializing with the outcast minority and asserting
their fundamental human rights encouraged self-organization by African-
Americans. One expression of this self-confidence was the initiative they
showed in rescuing escaped slaves from would-be slave catchers. In 1836, a
contingent of African-American women freed fugitives Eliza Small and Polly
Ann Bates from a courtroom where they were about to be returned to slavery.
Lewis Hayden, one of the central leaders of the antebellum black community,
threatened to blow up the slave hunters who had come for Ellen and William
Crafts with dynamite in 1850. The next year Hayden and attorney Robert
Morris engineered the daring rescue of Fred Wilkins (“Shadrach”) from a
courtroom. Like David Walker, Hayden too operated a clothing store, and
exercised his leadership more assertively within the African-American com¬
munity than in collaboration with whites. African-Americans also partici¬
pated in rescue attempts in which whites took the lead. These highly
dramatic episodes were in large measure the result of black self-organization
and were facilitated by the climate brought about by Garrisonian aboli¬
tionism. 29

The Civil War deepened the sense of African-American Bostonians that
they were the authors of their own liberation. The Massachusetts 54th Regi¬
ment was the first black unit of northern free volunteers, and the 55th fol¬
lowed soon after. Soldiers were recruited around the state and nation for
the regiments. In Boston, Wendell Phillips and attorney Robert C. Morris
addressed a February meeting at the Joy Street Church, the oldest black com¬
munity meeting-house in the city. In all, 3,967 African-Americans served in
Massachusetts regiments. Their heroic assault on Fort Wagner disproved
white assumptions about the fighting abilities of African-American soldiers.
After the war, many of the veterans settled in Boston, bringing with them a
new confidence and expectation of equal rights. Among them were James
Monroe Trotter, father of the militant editor, and James H. Wolff, an attor¬
ney who headed an integrated Grand Army of the Republic post? At least
one white officer of a black regiment, Norwood P. Hallowell, became a prom¬
inent civil rights activist in later years. In 1890, Luis F. Emilio published a

Introduction 15

popular account of the regiment’s exploits, and in 1897 city officially cele¬
brated the African-American veterans by dedicating the Augustus Saint-
Gaudens sculpture that stands across from the statehouse. Between 1890 and
1920, these African-American veterans and their descendants were a powerful
force for civil rights. 30

In the thirty years following the end of the Civil War, African-Americans
in Boston enjoyed a political preferment that was unusual in the North. Black
people held seats in the state legislature from 1866, when Charles L. Mitchell,
an abolitionist and Civil War veteran, and Edwin G. Walker, son of David
Walker, were elected. These were the first two African-Americans elected to
any state legislature. Off and on, African-Americans served in the legislature
until 1902-“03, when William Henry Lewis served his last term. Democratic
Governor Benjamin F. Butler appointed George L. Ruffin judge of the
Charleston Court in 1883; he was the first African-American jurist in the
North. An African-American representative from the heavily Republican
West End served on the Boston City Council until the 1895 redistricting.
Prominent federal appointees of the late nineteenth century included James
Monroe Trotter, William H. Dupree, Charles L. Mitchell, John M. Lenox,
and Archibald Grimke. These civil servants all performed their duties respon¬
sibly. The next generation, however, was blocked from political office. 31

The socioeconomic setting and political-cultural history of African-Amer¬
ican Boston explains its militance between 1890 and 1920. The black commu¬
nity was small enough in size and geography to be insulated from white
depredation, yet large and growing enough to feel self-confident. Black Bos¬
tonians enjoyed a unique personal freedom and regarded their city as a haven
from oppression. At the same time, long-term residents and migrants were
frustrated economically and endured harsher lives than their white neighbors.
They had a proud abolitionist tradition, and the institutions through which
to express themselves. The social basis for political accommodation, a busi¬
ness class, was weaker in Boston than in other cities. As the South began to
codify Jim Crow practices, and as white northerners regarded this process
with indifference, African-American Bostonians, many of whom were recent
migrants from the South, responded with anger and protest.

boston’s antislavery tradition in a

RAPIDLY CHANGING CITY

Bostonians who opposed racism between 1890 and 1920 were heirs to several
traditions of antislavery action. African-American Bostonians had the models
of David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Lewis Hayden, and William Cooper

16 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

Nell, among others. Irish-Americans could consider the antislavery stance of
Daniel O’Connell, whose legacy was revived in Boston by John Boyle
O’Reilly. The most celebrated history was the diverse tradition of the Yankee
New Englanders. Antislavery sentiment and its particularly Boston variant,
abolitionism, were deeply rooted in the entire project that began with the
arrival at Shawmut of John Winthrop and his Puritan followers in 1630. Bos¬
ton’s Revolutionary experience and its religious and intellectual achievements
also provided inspiration for a later generation. The abolitionist beliefs of
William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, the political antislavery ap¬
proach of the Conscience Whigs who helped found the Republican Party,
and the Reconstruction Era fight of Charles Sumner to guarantee civil and
political equality to the freedpeople, were living legacies to the activists of
1890 to 1920.

Yet, these “New Abolitionists,” as they sometimes called themselves, were
a tiny minority in a rapidly changing Boston that honored its abolitionist past
in words rather than deeds. The overwhelming public issue for politically
minded Bostonians of the day was not the race question, but the gradually
polarizing struggle between Yankee and British-American Protestant on one
side, and Irish-American Catholic on the other. Both groups alternately
courted and resisted the “new immigrants” who arrived from Russia and
southern Europe as well. The small number of activists kept the antislavery
tradition alive by struggling against the emerging Jim Crow system; to under¬
stand their actions we must reprise their heritage and describe their city.

Regardless of their religion, Boston’s civil rights activists owed much to
the original Puritan settlers. While the expressed Puritan view of slavery was
ambivalent, its deep structure of belief conflicted with slaveholding. On the
one hand slavery and the slave trade were practiced in Massachusetts, and
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Boston’s religious leaders
showed little hostility to them. Puritan divine Cotton Mather even accepted
a slave as a gift. On the other hand, judge Samuel Sewall issued a pamphlet
condemning slavery in newly secular Massachusetts in 1700. The Puritan
equating of virtue with independence, its emphasis upon the redemptive
qualities of hard work and thrift, and the freedom of its congregations from
hierarchy—all contributed to a worldview inimical to slavery. As the slavoc-
racy bred an aristocratic society that devalued individual labor, imposed rigid
thought control on the South, and sought to extend that control to American
institutions, those who subscribed to the constellation of values evoked by
Puritanism recoiled. 32

The liberating forces unleashed by the American Revolution further un¬
dermined the institution of slavery. The Revolutionary rhetoric of Bostonians

Introduction 17

about liberty and independence drew their attention to the contradiction
posed by slavery to a free democratic society. Among Boston’s first Revolu¬
tionary martyrs was the African-American Crispus Attucks. When the men
of Massachusetts met to ratify the Constitution, most agreed with the anti-
Federalist argument that slavery was indeed a wicked institution, but Federal¬
ists convinced the majority that slavery was best opposed by means of strong
government and Union. Boston’s Revolutionary tradition was also part of the
heritage of antiracist activists. 33

The development of Unitarianism from Congregationalism in the early
nineteenth century furthered spiritual antipathy to slavery in New England.
This more benign religion envisioned a world in which man was not born a
sinner, condemned—except for an elect few—to eternal hellfire. Man’s deeds
on earth therefore assumed greater importance. One historian, at least, argues
a direct link between the Unitarianism of William Ellery Channing and the
broad antislavery movement championed by preachers like Theodore Dwight
Weld. Transcendentalism, the secular correlate of Unitarianism, argued for
values of self-reliance, personal moral responsibility for the plight of others,
and the possibility of saintliness within each individual. Ralph Waldo Emer¬
son, Henry David Thoreau, and Harriet Beecher Stowe all contributed to an
enduring Boston-based New England legacy. The ideas of Unitarianism and
Transcendentalism advanced the multifaceted movement to reform schools,
prisons, and treatment of the handicapped, and to effect temperance and
secure women’s rights. While these reform movements were not unique to
Boston, their expression was particularly strong in the city that gave birth to
these twinned humanist philosophies. 34

Massachusetts politicians, including Bostonians, contributed to the anti¬
slavery tradition that emphasized free labor, free soil, and free men. Distinct
from abolitionism, which called for immediate emancipation and vilified
slaveholders as sinners, antislavery sought to contain the peculiar institution
within the South, where it would expire of its inner contradictions. This
sentiment led Congressman and former President John Quincy Adams to
oppose the ban on presentation of antislavery petitions to Congress between
1836 and 1844. A Conscience Whig grouping that included Charles Francis
Adams, Stephen C. Phillips, John G. Palfrey, Henry Wilson, Richard Henry
Dana, Charles Sumner, and others opposed the annexation of Texas. They
triumphed in state politics in the i860 election that brought John Andrew to
the governorship and carried the state for Abraham Lincoln. The Republican
Party, which dominated state politics for most of the period under our con¬
sideration, looked to these antislavery politicians as their political forebears. 35

However, Boston was not simply a hotbed of antislavery. The postwar

18 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

generation, seeking to ratify in public memory the outcome of the war, cele¬
brated its antislavery partisans. The reality was more complex. Throughout
the antebellum period, the “lords of the loom,” textile manufacturing barons
such as the brothers Amos and Abott Lawrence, forged significant social and
economic ties to the planter aristocracy that supplied them with cotton. Dan¬
iel Webster, Robert C. Winthrop, and Edward Everett represented the “Cot¬
ton Whigs” in government, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court
Lemuel Shaw or United States Associate Justice Benjamin C. Robbins did
on the bench. When southern governors demanded the extirpation of David
Walkers “Appeal” or Garrison’s Liberator, Boston Mayor Harrison Gray Otis
correctly reassured his southern inquisitors that no man of property paid ei¬
ther any heed. The well-heeled “broadcloth mob” that nearly lynched Garri¬
son in 1835 never entirely disappeared. However, even the Cotton Whigs were
radicalized by the dramatic chain of events leading to the Civil War. 36

For the generation that confronted Jim Crow between 1890 and 1920, the
central actors in the antebellum drama were the abolitionists William Lloyd
Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, and Charles Sumner. As
early as 1837, Massachusetts was home to 145 abolition societies, more than
one-tenth of the nation’s total, exceeded only by New York and Ohio. These
thousands of activists included many other prominent local and national lead¬
ers, such as Samuel E. Sewall, Samuel J. May, Maria Weston Chapman,
Bronson Alcott, David and Lydia Maria Child, the poet John Greenleaf
Whittier, Sarah and Angelina Grimke and countless others. Their three dec¬
ades of endeavor left a particularly powerful legacy in Boston. Descendants
of these activists, both literal and figurative offspring, had to grapple with
their heritage. Ancient veterans had to come to terms with their own pasts
in the face of new challenges. 37

This legacy was extremely complex and contained within it conflicting
tendencies. If there was one common theme, it was simply the moral impera¬
tive to “make the world better” as suffragist and former abolitionist Lucy
Stone whispered on her deathbed to her daughter Alice Stone Blackwell.
History had left few clear lessons for the next generation, except that virtue
might be rewarded by actual victory in the real world: slavery was dead and
would never come back. Some questions that had vexed the antebellum re¬
formers were now closed or moot. The Constitution, which by 1870 guaran¬
teed the rights of African-Americans, could now be safely looked to as a
bedrock of freedom rather than a “covenant with death and an agreement
with hell,” as Garrison once called it. There was no longer a question of
abstaining from politics or “coming out” of immoral churches. How the abo-

Introduction 19

litionists had handled these problems were now historical questions for the
antiracists of the 1890s.

The many real questions that confronted the New Abolitionists could not
be solved by appeals to authority. How should antiracists organize? Should
blacks and whites maintain separate organizations? What relation should
women’s rights bear to African-American rights? What was the relation of
broader socioeconomic questions to the civil rights agenda? What should civil
rights activists do in politics? What balance should they strike between fed¬
eral authority and the states’ rights argument advanced by the South? These
and other questions could not be answered simply by studying the actions of
earlier leaders; they had differed widely among themselves, as a vast histori¬
ography now attests. 38 Still, the men and women of 1890 to 1920 measured
their opinions by the legacy of their antecedents, hoping to find clues to the
questions of their day in the answers given in the past.

Although the abolitionists left no textbooks, their inspiration was real and
played a special role in Boston. Every village and town in the country had its
Civil War memorial, but Boston erected monuments to its African-American
Revolutionary martyrs and Civil War veterans, and officially celebrated the
most radical of the abolitionists, the Garrisonians. Participants in the anti¬
slavery crusade lived on throughout this epoch and served as living reminders
of the work of the past, even if they retreated from former positions. Freder¬
ick Douglass had lived a few years in New Bedford and Lynn, Massachusetts,
and his spirit hovered over the civil rights community even after his death in
1895. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin was the widow of Douglass’s friend George
Ruffin; she founded Boston’s Woman’s Era Club. Thomas Wentworth Hig-
ginson, Unitarian minister and backer of John Brown, devoted himself to
literature and an occasional political foray. William Lloyd Garrison II, eldest
son of the great abolitionist, was the conscience of the women’s suffrage
movement. Youngest son Francis Jackson Garrison served as the first presi¬
dent of Boston’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peo¬
ple until his death in 1916. Editor William Monroe Trotter’s father was a
Civil War veteran who refused to accept less pay than white soldiers. Charles
Sumner’s secretary, Moorfield Storey, was the national president of the
NAACP and a key association legal strategist until his death in 1929. Albert
E. Pillsbury, another Boston NAACP leader, was the nephew of abolitionist
Parker Pillsbury. The African-American attorney, diplomat, and later
NAACP leader Archibald Grimke was a protege of his famous abolitionist
aunts Sarah and Angelina Grimke; as a young man he strolled with the el¬
derly Wendell Phillips. These people who fought for equal rights between
1890 and 1920 knew the heroes and heroines of the past intimately. Unlike

20 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

the previous generation, who lived to see the abolition of slavery, the second-
generation Trotters and Garrisons lived to see the triumph of institutional¬
ized racism. Perhaps more painfully, none of them lived to see a new genera¬
tion follow in their footsteps.

The foremost question facing the city in the years 1890-1920 was the rela¬
tion between the Brahmin aristocracy and Protestant population on the one
hand, and the rapidly growing Irish-Catholic population on the other. While
this relation was marked by cooperation as well as conflict, the mayoral victo¬
ries of John F. Fitzgerald in 1905 and James Michael Curley in 1913 exacer¬
bated the tensions. Old and new immigrants fought with both sides, and
with each other. Shared Catholicity was sometimes a source of friction, rather
than cohesion, as ethnic groups vied for power within the church. In the
North End, Italian- and Irish-American workers competed for jobs. Labor
struggles punctuated this generally prosperous era, especially in the wake of
the 1893 depression and the post-World War I economic uncertainty. To
regulate the authority of the emerging Irish-led political majority in the city,
Yankee elitists turned to Progressive governmental reforms that sparked in¬
tense controversy. Some among the same elite encouraged restrictions on
foreign immigration, and became increasingly attracted to racialist theories
of human character. White Bostonians turned inward, leaving the South to
settle “its own” race problem. A new mood of anxiety and disillusion affected
even those who had participated in the earlier movement. Those who fought
on now bucked the tide of a new era, sometimes seeming to be aged people
agitating the questions of a bygone day. 39

Although Irish-Americans had often opposed antislavery activity in the
antebellum period, the experience of the Civil War and the radicalism of the
Irish national struggle encouraged some sympathy for the postwar plight of
African-Americans. This sentiment was best expressed by the poet and na¬
tionalist John Boyle O’Reilly, editor of the Boston Pilot until his death in
1890. When an American-born son of Irish immigrants secured the mayoralty
for the first time in 1905, John F. Fitzgerald appealed with some success for
African-American votes. In office, Fitzgerald spoke at meetings sponsored
by William Monroe Trotter and the NAACP, expressing the solidarity of
Irish-Americans with their fellow victims of discrimination. Generally, Irish-
Americans and African-Americans tended to be divided politically; the for¬
mer were largely Democrats and the latter Republicans. During the dispute
over the 1890 Federal Elections bill, the Irish-American regular Democratic
weekly, the Republic , bitterly attacked a bill that would guarantee black voting
rights. 40

The Irish-Yankee struggle affected black Bostonians in unforeseen ways.

Introduction 21

As the Irish gained political ascendancy in Boston, bankers and financiers
lost confidence in the city’s investment climate. Fearing that their profits
would be taxed to provide social services to the lower classes, they increasingly
invested abroad and created conservative trust funds. Financially conservative
Boston was bypassed by other metropolitan centers in the East and Midwest.
The failure of the local capitalist class to spur economic growth made it
difficult for African-Americans to advance in a stagnant economy, and lim¬
ited the growth of black entrepreneurship. 41

In addition, the polarized situation in Boston had short and long-term
political consequences for black Bostonians. In the short term, Boston’s eth¬
nic and class conflicts diverted attention from the worsening racial oppression
in the South. Especially after the failure of the Federal Elections bill in 1890,
Brahmin Republican politicians gave up trying to build an alliance with Afri¬
can-American southerners as a lost cause. In that year, Massachusetts Repub¬
licans lost the state house to a coalition of Democrats and Republican
independents, or Mugwumps. Among them were former Republicans like
Moorfield Storey, once Charles Sumner’s secretary and later a leader of the
NAACP. Some black voters even declared for the Democrats as Republicans
disappointed them. William Monroe Trotter hoped that African-Americans
would hold an electoral balance of power, but as their already small vote split
they were increasingly disregarded. In 1895, a redistricting of the city’s wards
diluted black voting strength, and African-Americans disappeared from the
City Council until the 1960s. In the longer term, the ethnic nationalism
inspired by politicians like James Michael Curley encouraged race chauvinism
that decades later would turn against a larger and resurgent black community.

A new wave of immigration to America and Boston from czarist Russia,
Italy, and the Balkans caused a rethinking of the notion of race by a signifi¬
cant part of the Brahmin elite. Some members of the upper class who once
believed in the ability of America to assimilate its immigrants now began to
argue that in fact, “races” had distinct hereditary traits, and therefore immi¬
gration of inferior races should be limited. They regarded northern Europe¬
ans—Britons, Germans, Scandinavians—as superior, and all else as inferior.
The campaign of the Boston-based Immigration Restriction League suc¬
ceeded in passing national restrictive legislation in 1922 and 1924. Despite the
fact that the league’s actions were not directed at African-Americans, the
ideological apparatus that underlay the campaign was easily directed against
them. Many leaders whose forebears had upheld the malleability of human¬
kind now showed a devolution of values: the striking example was the Adams
family, whose earlier generations were antislavery people and whose later
generations became racists. Henry Cabot Lodge began his political career

22 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

under the influence of Charles Sumner, but he developed into an immigra¬
tion restrictionist. Lodge in turn was the power behind the appointment of
Oliver Wendell Holmes to the Supreme Court, and Holmes, despite his
friendship with prominent Jewish legal scholars, proved a disappointment to
civil rights supporters. The immigration to Boston of Jews, Italians, Balts,
and Slavs in general encouraged conservative notions about race among Bos¬
tonians who legislated on or wrote about the matter. 42

Even among the best elements of the aristocracy, a certain retrogression
could be seen from the end of the heroic era of the Civil War and the early
Reconstruction period. Abolitionist leaders such as minister Theodore Parker
died in i860, Sumner in 1874, Garrison in 1879, Phillips in 1884, and Douglass
in 1895. The death of these leaders left a void that the new generation could
not fill, not because of personal failings but because of wider shifts in public
sentiment. The closest to these men in stature and heroism was Thomas
Wentworth Higginson, mastermind of attempted rescues of fugitive slaves,
staunch ally of John Brown, and commander of the First South Carolina
Volunteers, a regiment of freedmen. If Higginson exhibited a paternalistic
attitude toward his troops in his book about their exploits, he was still far in
advance of other whites in his racial sensibilities. Higginson, however, in the
postwar period devoted himself to civic and literary affairs, retreating from
defense of the freedmen’s rights. Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, Garrison¬
ian abolitionists in the antebellum period, argued later that women’s suffrage
would guarantee white supremacy in the South. Some former abolitionists
did retreat on questions of racial equality under the pressure of evolving na¬
tional opinion. 43

Within this context, however, various small and sometimes overlapping
groups of activists, influenced by the earlier humanitarian traditions, fought
a defensive battle to preserve the gains registered by the Fourteenth and Fif¬
teenth Amendments. Sometimes isolated, sometimes able to rally thousands
of supporters and more conservative thinkers to their side, they cried out
against the drift toward racism that characterized the period. The group
around William Monroe Trotter, the NAACP, and diverse individual activ¬
ists such as John Boyle O’Reilly, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and briefly even
Republican Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge, exerted a unique national
influence for civil rights.

THE NATIONAL RISE OF RACISM

A complex interaction of factors framed the debate on race relations during
the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Antidemocratic tendencies toward the

Introduction 23

consolidation of capital fueled racist sentiment in the North as well as the
South, and when southern African-Americans fled to the North in the Great
Migration during the World War, they were met by mobs in many northern
cities. Economic unrest, imperial expansion with its accompanying ideologi¬
cal justification, negative presidential action, the appearance of new reform
issues, and the turmoil that followed in the wake of World War I all contrib¬
uted to the national rise of racism. While this phenomenon was general to
the country as a whole, a qualitatively different and more virulent form of
race hatred gathered strength in the South and expressed itself with increas¬
ing violence and crudity between 1890 and 1920. White supremacists gradu¬
ally disfranchised African-American voters, segregated them socially, forced
millions into poverty or debt peonage, and lynched them publicly to enforce
the new order with terror. Since this study examines the response of Bosto¬
nians to this process, we need briefly to reprise its salient developments.

The Gilded Age was above all a period of capital consolidation that gave
birth to powerful trusts and spectacularly wealthy individuals whose economic
decisions controlled the lives of millions. A profound economic depression
sparked labor upsurges in the early 1890s, and although the economy re¬
bounded by the time of the Spanish-American War, the next twenty years
were also punctuated by labor unrest, culminating in the strike wave of 1919
that affected much of America’s basic industry. As workers formed them¬
selves into an American Federation of Labor, they infused the organization
with their racial attitudes and generally excluded African-American laborers.
White workers conceived of blacks as potential strikebreakers; they in turn
resented being excluded from jobs for which they were qualified. The eco¬
nomic tensions of the period encouraged white chauvinism nationally. 44

America’s acquisition of foreign colonies inhabited by people of color fur¬
ther exacerbated domestic race problems. The American empire was born
during the golden era of world imperialism, when the European powers dom¬
inated Africa and Asia, taking up Rudyard Kipling’s “white man’s burden.”
As Americans made themselves masters of the Caribbean, Hawaii, and the
Philippines, they justified their dominance over foreign peoples by asserting
their racial superiority. Although the foreign wars marked an expansion of
federal power that southerners often wished to check, they joined enthusiasti¬
cally in the war effort. The United States conquered Cuba, Puerto Rico,
Hawaii, and the Philippines as a white supremacist power. 45

Presidential leadership both followed and molded popular national trends.
After the failure of the Federal Elections bill in 1890 during the administra¬
tion of Benjamin Harrison, Republican presidents increasingly ceded the
South to Democratic control and abandoned the project of building up an

24 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

African-American-based Republican Party. Like his predecessor, Demo¬
cratic President Grover Cleveland looked on silently as lynching soared
throughout the South. William McKinley, the last Civil War veteran to serve
in the White House, studiously avoided comment upon southern outrages
like the Wilmington, North Carolina, massacre of 1898. Theodore Roosevelt
shocked southern sensibilities by inviting Booker T. Washington to dinner
at the White House, but learned never to repeat that indiscretion. When he
discharged without due process a large number of African-American troops
in the wake of the Brownsville incident of 1906, African-Americans grew
increasingly disenchanted with the Republican Party. In this case, black sol¬
diers were accused of shooting up a town that had been hostile to them, but
recent scholarship suggests that the men were innocent. William Howard
Taft, the cabinet member responsible for the dismissal, deeply offended Afri¬
can-Americans by his action. Woodrow Wilson’s two terms marked the very
bottom for African-Americans. Wilson’s segregation of the federal depart¬
ments made Jim Crow national and integration local. This triumph of south¬
ern policy stood firm until the Franklin Roosevelt administration. 46

Even the appearance of Progressivism paradoxically played into the hands
of racists. At the simplest level, northern reformers were diverted from the
race question, viewing it as an old and intractable problem, the failed project
of an older generation. In the South, Progressive reform of industry and
politics was inextricably connected with white supremacy. When southern
Progressives directed economic reform agitation against Big Business, they
railed against northern control and whipped up sectional and racial pride.
When primary elections replaced boss control in the South, these were white
primaries. Charles B. Aycock of North Carolina, James K. Vardaman of Mis¬
sissippi, and Hoke Smith of Georgia were all white supremacists who won
gubernatorial office with promises of Progressive reform. 47

World War I and the participation of black troops sharpened racial conflict.
As American industry strove to meet Allied war needs, and European immi¬
gration was cut off, African-Americans were pulled to the North by the
promise of industrial jobs and pushed from the South by crop failures and
Jim Crow practices. Between 1910 and 1920, about 323,000 African-Ameri¬
cans, 4.9 percent of the 1910 southern black population, left the region. In
the North, they were greeted with suspicion and sometimes violence by white
workers, but many found jobs and a new independence. When the United
States entered the war, African-American troops fought bravely despite suf¬
fering indignities. As they returned home, these veterans expected white
Americans to live up to Woodrow Wilson’s promise that victory would make
the world safe for democracy. Having received the gratitude of white French

Introduction 25

citizens, they were all the more disillusioned by the explosion of violence in
1919. The Great Migration and World War I made Negrophobia more a
national than a strictly southern problem. 48

Despite the prevalence of northern racism, the southern variety was quali¬
tatively different. African-Americans suffered discrimination of all sorts in
the North, but the South between 1890 and 1920 codified legal caste relations
between the races. The South built a different kind of society in this period,
an undemocratic order founded upon race-based social engineering. This new
caste society was in one sense more terrifying than slave society, in that the
popular masses felt vested in white supremacy. Even the paternalism of the
slave master, now expressed in support for Booker Washington’s policy of
accommodation and racial uplift, came under attack. Political disfranchise¬
ment, social segregation, and economic oppression defined the new order,
and public lynching, a secular ritual, consecrated it in blood.

The southern populist revolt of the early 1890s at first sought to unite black
and white farmers against railroads, banks, and politicians in their service.
Alarmed at the success of southern Alliance candidates, regular Democrats
broke the populist racial coalition by invoking white supremacy. The failure
of the Alliance to withstand this attack greatly encouraged sentiment to dis¬
franchise black voters. Throughout the region, disfranchisement had been
accomplished by fraud until 1890, but fraud offended northern sensibilities
and was, obviously, illegal. Henry Cabot Lodge’s Federal Elections bill
threatened to send United States election commissioners to supervise elec¬
tions where fraud was alleged, but the bill was defeated in the Senate in 1891.
Mississippi inaugurated the trend toward official disfranchisement in 1890 by
calling a constitutional convention that established a literacy test for voting,
which could be avoided by means of an “understanding” clause: illiterates
who “understood” the constitution could vote. This project of Black Belt
plantation aristocrats threatened also to disfranchise poor whites, and the
new constitution, like all that followed save one, was not even submitted to
popular ratification. In other states, property requirements or poll taxes were
added, and some opted for “grandfather” clauses that permitted descendants
of 1867 voters (all white) or veterans to vote. By means of convention or
amendment, South Carolina in 1895, Louisiana in 1898, North Carolina in
1900, Alabama in 1901, Georgia in 1908, and all the other southern states rid
themselves of millions of potential African-American voters. The movement
was encouraged by the 1898 decision of the Supreme Court in Williams v.
Mississippi that upheld the state’s voting procedure. 49

Racial segregation was spottily enforced until the late 1880s and coincided
with the economic fluctuations that brought on populism. In the late 1880s

26 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

and early 1890s, southern states began passing laws to segregate public trans¬
portation. This new arrangement was ratified by the Plessy v. Ferguson Su¬
preme Court ruling on a Louisiana case in 1896. In the first decade of the
new century ten southern states expanded transportation segregation legisla¬
tion, and in the next decade many cities established residential segregation
ordinances. Schools had never been integrated. Bostonians who confronted
Jim Crow were thus disputing a new system with roots in the past, not a
long-established “folkway” that had always existed. 50

The violence and terror that enforced this new arrangement was similarly
rooted in the legacy of slavery and the overthrow of Reconstruction. Never¬
theless, the phenomenon of lynching reached new depths in the early 1890s.
As the numbers of lynchings decreased in the new century, the spectacles
became increasingly public and barbaric. The most dramatic of these cere¬
monies included the extrajudicial executions of Sam Hose near Atlanta in
1899; Leo Frank, a Jew, also near Atlanta in 1915; and that of a retarded man
in Waco, Texas, in 1916. Southern whites often charged that their victims had
outraged white women, but sometimes, as in the 1892 Memphis case that set
Ida B. Wells on her antilynching crusade, the victims were merely successful
business competitors. During the 1890s there were 187.5 lynchings annually,
82 percent of which were committed in the South; in the following decade
that percentage rose to 92 percent. In addition to these depredations launched
upon individually targeted citizens, white mobs sometimes invaded black dis¬
tricts and indiscriminately killed and terrorized African-Americans at ran¬
dom. These riots had diverse causes but a common goal of enforcing white
supremacy. The most spectacular of these incidents took place in Wilming¬
ton, North Carolina, in 1898; Atlanta in 1906; Elaine, Arkansas, in 1919; and
Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921. Fittingly, it was the spread of mob violence to the
North, in the Springfield, Illinois, attack of 1908, that sparked the founding
of the NAACP. 51

Nineteen years before that reform organization was launched, Boston’s
Republican politicians sought to ensure their party’s hegemony by protecting
the right of African-American men to vote. The next chapter examines how
the city’s political and journalistic leaders fought in the halls of Congress, the
columns of the newspapers, and the meeting-halls of Boston to sway public
opinion.

Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge painted by John S. Sargent. Photograph taken by
Edward Moore, published in Boston Herald ’ August 15,1963. Courtesy of the Boston
Public Library.

ONE

*tt**t*t*s*

The Federal Elections Bill of 1890
and Boston’s Upper Class

By 1890, the Boston Brahmins constituted a highly self-conscious yet het¬
erogeneous leadership class. The term “Brahmin” was coined by the city’s
unofficial poet laureate Oliver Wendell Holmes, and referred to families with
“four or five generations of gentlemen and gentlewomen”; that is, it described
a cultural-intellectual aristocracy rather than nouveau owners of railroads or
paper mills. 1 The analogy to India’s leading caste was apt, for membership in
Boston’s upper class was granted more by inheritance than by striving. The
Cabots and Lowells may well have been deeply involved in the commercial
spirit of the age, but they retained a sense of distaste for mere covetousness,
ostentation, or lust for power. To one degree or another, to be a “proper
Bostonian” in 1890 was to be still concerned with building John Winthrop’s
city on a hill, or at least a representative institution of that model for all
humanity.

At the same time, to be a Brahmin in 1890 was also to feel threatened from
without, and to share a sense of the decline of one’s values. New financial
empires based in New York or industrial conglomerates in Pennsylvania and
Ohio dwarfed the conservative investment houses of State Street. Midwest¬
ern farmers revolted against eastern bankers and railroad men. Southern poli¬
ticians, both Bourbon and Populist, defended their racial mores against
perceived northern encroachments. Nationally, the dominance of the Repub¬
lican Party could no longer be taken for granted, and by 1884 many Brahmins
had become Independents. In Boston itself, Hugh O’Brien, a Democratic
Irishman, won the mayoralty that year.

Massachusetts Republicans resolved to reestablish party hegemony by
passing a Federal Elections bill that would protect black voters in the South.
In 1890, Representative Henry Cabot Lodge and Senator George Frisbie

30 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

Hoar led the last congressional battle for civil rights legislation until the
1920s, when an antilynching bill failed. Black Bostonians rallied in a united
show of support, as Republican Julius C. Chappelle and Democrat Edwin
Garrison Walker recognized the import of the initiative. White Boston Dem¬
ocrats argued against the “Force Bill,” as they called it, dismissing the right
of southern African-Americans to vote. Democrat William Eustis Russell, of
prominent Cambridge lineage, won the gubernatorial election that year. The
Independents, or Mugwumps, took a cautiously negative approach toward
the bill. This camp, which included many former civil rights advocates, had
wearied of efforts to defend African-American rights; they were motivated
primarily by a desire for civil service reform. Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
an occasional politician, typified this group. Each faction also was represented
by at least one newspaper that discussed the issue of voting rights at length.

None of these politicians or newspapers, of course, was concerned solely
with civil rights matters. The Federal Elections bill emerged in the context
of national debate about the tariff, currency, civil service reform, and other
issues. Nevertheless, the question of the African-American's place in society
surfaced with special force after the Republican electoral victory of 1888 which
brought Benjamin Harrison to the presidency and Republican majorities to
both houses of Congress. The politics of the post-Reconstruction Era was
marked above all by parity between an increasingly “solid” Republican North
and Democratic South so that neither party dominated two branches of gov¬
ernment for long. Republicans now sensed an opportunity to break the Solid
South, but to do that, black men would have to vote. Convinced that south¬
ern Democrats were employing fraud and intimidation to control the ballot,
Republicans sought to craft a putatively nonpartisan and nonsectional law
that would mandate federal supervision of contested elections. The bill passed
the House in July 1890 but failed in the Senate the following January. Silver
state Republicans and northern machine politicians kept the bill from the
floor when southerners threatened an economic boycott and filibuster . 2

The failure of the bill marked the end of an era in American race relations,
and the beginning of the nadir of African-American history. Mississippi dis¬
franchised its black voters during the course of that very year, followed by
South Carolina in 1895, and Louisiana in 1898. Lynching reached an all-
time high in 1892. While the increasing tensions brought on by the Populist
movement and the depression of 1893 were the main factors behind these
developments, the failure of the Federal Elections bill also contributed to the
South’s sense that the North would no longer interfere with its race relations
policies.

It is a significant testimony to the primacy of Massachusetts in the civil

The Federal Elections Bill of 1890 31

rights crusade that the fight for the election bill was led by Bay State Brah¬
mins Lodge and Hoar. These politicians were both descendants of Boston’s
political antislavery movement and the tradition of Charles Sumner and John
Quincy Adams. This, however, was the last fight of powerful Bostonians for
civil rights in Congress. Their retreat greatly facilitated the national advance
of racism.

REPUBLICAN VICTORY IN THE HOUSE

Between 1877 and 1890, Republican political strategists oscillated between two
policies. Sometimes they felt that the antebellum Whig coalition could be
rebuilt as the South industrialized and modernized. The Compromise of 1877,
which removed federal troops from the South and gave the White House
to Rutherford B. Hayes, was the classic example of this policy. Northern
Republicans hoped that one part of the arrangement, construction of a rail¬
road linking the South with the Pacific Coast, would stimulate a “New De¬
parture” in which northern commercial values would triumph over southern
provincialism. These hopes were repeatedly disappointed. Presidents Hayes,
James A. Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, and Benjamin Harrison could not find
a successful formula to build a viable Republican Party in the South. Con¬
fronted with race-baiting, the southern white Republicans could not be
swayed to build a biracial political party. Repeated attacks on African-Ameri¬
can voters drove northern Republicans to “wave the bloody shirt” to create
an equally solid North. The party that led the Civil War victory was not about
to surrender to an unregenerate South after Reconstruction. At stake was
northern industry and commerce itself. In Republican eyes, Democratic vic¬
tory meant unprotected industry, a debased currency, and weaker control of
rebellious workers, farmers, and Irish immigrants. 3

Northern Republicans had ample reason to believe they were being
cheated. Using the 1880 census figures, they calculated that in 1888, thirty-
three congressional districts in the former slave states had black population
majorities. At a time when the overwhelming majority of African-Americans
voted Republican, only three of these districts returned Republican congress¬
men. A mere 697,425 men voted in these districts, but thirty-three New York
districts polled 1,206,304 votes. Intimidation of black voters thus accounted
for at least thirty stolen seats, of the 123 districts in the old slave states. Be¬
yond this, Republicans tallied another eleven southern districts in which there
was a small majority of whites, enough of whom were Republicans, to pro¬
duce a majority, all of which went Democrat in 1888. To the Democratic
claim that the southern Republicans were an isolated minority, their oppo-

32 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

nents pointed to the seventeen southern Republicans returned to the 51st
Congress. Furthermore, the Republicans estimated that these stolen districts
would produce Republican presidential victories in Virginia, the Carolinas,
Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida. 4

Henry Cabot Lodge was serving only his second term in the U.S. Con¬
gress, representing the state’s North Shore, when he began to formulate a bill
to address this problem. Lodge had already helped to elect his ally Thomas
Reed of Maine as Speaker of the House. Reed in turn saw that Lodge was
named chairman of a special committee on elections . 5

Lodge was a proper Bostonian to the marrow of his bones. He descended
from old merchant families on both sides of his lineage, trained at the fash¬
ionable Mr. Dixwell’s School as a boy, and studied at Harvard and its law
school. Later he earned a Ph.D. in history, and taught at Harvard. Senator
Charles Sumner was a visitor at his boyhood home, and Lodge, born in
1850, was powerfully influenced by the Senator during the Civil War and
Reconstruction. With his friends Henry and Brooks Adams, and Moorfield
Storey, he opposed President Ulysses S. Grant as a Liberal Republican.
Lodge also harbored his own political ambitions, and by 1883 he became
chairman of the party’s state committee. Lodge encountered the defining
moment of his career when the following year he backed the controversial
party presidential nominee James G. Blaine, whose opponents charged him
with corruption. Lodge’s former friends in the Liberal camp cut off personal
relations with him. Men like Charles R. Codman, Harvard President Charles
W. Eliot, Moorfield Storey, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson repudiated
him. They argued that gentlemen of honor should not support opportunists
like Blaine, even though he was the party candidate. 6

Stung by their attacks, Lodge felt that the principles of the party were
more important than the morality of the candidate. Two years later he won a
close battle for U.S. Congress by a few hundred votes, and was reelected in
1888 by a wide margin. Newly elected President Benjamin Harrison had
barely won, and so sought to broaden his base by conciliating the South.
West Virginia had voted Republican, and for the first time several other
southern states returned impressive Republican minorities. Encouraged, Har¬
rison appointed many southerners to office. But when Democrats counterat¬
tacked by race-baiting their rivals, the southern Republicans adopted the
same tactics. Alabama led the way by forming an all-white Republican Party.
African-American Republicans protested to Harrison unsuccessfully. Barred
from the Republican Party, enough Alabama African-Americans voted
Democratic so that the Republicans lost the next election. Nevertheless, Har¬
rison and other leading Republicans backed lily-whites again in Louisiana

The Federal Elections Bill of 1890 33

and Virginia with the same results. With nothing to vote for, fearful of vio¬
lence or economic reprisal, African-Americans did not vote, and Democrats
triumphed. Northern Republican newpapers, including Liberal Republican
journals like the New York Times , called for a reexamination of political
strategy . 7

The question of African-American rights now assumed new importance
in northern Republican eyes. In the spring of 1890 New Hampshire Senator
Henry W. Blair proposed an education bill that would for the first time award
federal dollars rather than land grants to the states. The grants would be
based on the percent of adult illiterates in a state; thus the money would flow
disproportionately to the South. The bill did not mandate desegregation,
but states could not discriminate in apportioning the funds. Blairs stated
motivation was to educate the southern African-American and prepare him
for full citizenship. Despite President Harrison’s support, the bill succumbed
to a diverse coalition that foreshadowed the fate of the Lodge bill. Southern
Democrats opposed the bill as unwarranted federal interference in state af¬
fairs, arguing that the cost would be used to justify an increased revenue tariff.
Some northern Republicans feared the bill gave the South too much leeway;
others opposed any federal control over education. Like the Lodge bill, it
represented an attempt by northern Republicans to modernize the South by
crafting nominally nonsectional legislation. 8

When the lily-white Republican faction in Virginia lost the governor’s
race, in 1889, President Harrison began to cast about for a formula to rebuild
a Republican Party in the South that included black voters. In April 1890 the
party leaders instructed Lodge to craft an appropriate measure. As chairman
of the Elections Committee, Lodge was already holding hearings on the
subject. The congressmen heard ample testimony that black and white Re¬
publicans were defrauded in congressional elections. Lodge’s bill provided
that one hundred voters in a congressional district, or fifty in a county, could
demand an investigation into alleged irregularities. Bipartisan panels were to
be appointed by U.S. District Court judges to investigate. These supervisors
were granted broad powers to inspect registration books. In the context of
the times, this was a strong measure. Nevertheless, the bill was narrow in
scope in that it addressed only elections to national office. Moreover, it said
nothing about guaranteeing a secret ballot, a measure Massachusetts had
passed in 1886 and about which Lodge cared passionately. The proposal was
consonant with the Fourteenth Amendment, which gave Congress limited
powers to regulate the election of its members. 9

Lodge was probably guided by mixed motives in framing the bill. Certainly
political expediency was one concern. He was a party loyalist and fierce parti-

34 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

san against Democrats and Mugwumps. However, he was also the heir of
dovetailing Boston political traditions that informed the bill. As a Harvard
historian particularly concerned with federalism and his own family heritage,
Lodge believed in a strong national government and fair ballot. As a follower
of Sumner, he also believed in the Fourteenth Amendment and the principle
of equal protection under the law. Lodge’s advocacy of this measure was
heartfelt and genuine. If he downplayed the particular injustice against Afri¬
can-Americans in motivating the bill, he did not ignore the issue. His
speeches reflected a blend of idealism and realism in appraising the temper
of the Congress and later the electorate.

Lodge also showed little regard for the political consequences of his advo¬
cacy. When a friend warned that the bill might prove deleterious to his politi¬
cal health, the congressman was undaunted. “I supposed that you proposed
the bill as a party measure,” attorney Sigourney Butler wrote. “But your letter
shows an intensity of conviction on the subject that I did not guess.” The
Federal Elections bill was part of the nationalist framework that made him
also a protectionist, opponent of immigration, and later an imperialist. “If it
is important to protect American industries, it is vastly more important to
protect American voters in their right to vote,” he argued. He denied there
was anything sectional about the matter, criticizing crooked elections in New
Jersey and calling for secret ballot laws North and South. “To demand honest
elections,” he asserted, “is neither to raise a ‘war issue’ nor is it ‘waving the
bloody shirt.’ ” 10

Southern Republicans, black and white, testified to the urgency of passage.
“The elections—both state and Federal—as held in South Carolina under its
present management are a perfect farce,” wrote a white Republican. After
detailing a long list of fraudulent practices that effectively disfranchised all
Republicans in the Camden, South Carolina, area, the writer concluded,
“The colored people are now really in a worse condition than they were as
slaves. They have no protection whatever for life or property.” When the bill
was tabled in the Senate, South Carolina Republicans were stymied in the
election of 1890. “The failure to pass the Lodge Election bill has knocked
us completely out in this state,” wrote a Charleston African-American in a
letter forwarded to Lodge. He mournfully concluded that now “we will have
trouble to carry the black district” when before four districts might have gone
Republican. From Scottsboro, Alabama, an unlettered white Republican
showing no particular concern for African-American rights advised that
“white men are a lone [5/r] nominated on the Republican state ticket in Ala¬
bama. Yet they are as regularly counted out as if they were Negroes.” Albion
W. Tourgee, Ohio novelist and one-time carpetbagger in North Carolina,

The Federal Elections Bill of 1890 35

wrote Lodge regarding the high stakes for southerners concerned with the
democratic process. 11

Southern Republican congressmen did not necessarily see the matter in
the same light. In the party caucus southern and western representatives ar¬
gued that it was an obstacle to passage of pro-silver laws. The southerners
claimed that the bill would merely inflame sectional tensions, which ought to
be cooled. The measure squeaked through the caucus by only one vote, but
strict party discipline enforced by Speaker Reed would guarantee victory if
the ranks turned out to vote when the bill reached the floor. 12

Lodge made a gallant appeal for his bill in a speech to the House on 26
June. According to the Boston Globe , a vociferous Lodge opponent, “A great
many Democrats expressed surprise that he should have been so temperate
in what he said and complimented him by saying that it was the speech of a
statesman holding mistaken views/’ The purpose of the bill, Lodge argued,
was “to secure complete publicity at every stage of a congressional election.”
Far from being a partisan measure, the ultimate enforcement agency would
be the neutral judiciary that would appoint the election officers. The bill was
simply a fair ballot measure to secure every voter his rights. Nevertheless,
because many Americans believed that in some southern districts the elec¬
tions were fraudulent, the bill would dispel that notion if the allegations were
false. No party would benefit by the law if in fact there was no fraud. Nor did
Lodge shrink from the real issue. Citing fraud at the North first, he reminded
the congressmen that “as to the South, it was largely a question of race.” He
recalled the loyalty of the Negro both to his master under slavery and to his
nation during the war, and vowed that the Negro “deserved a better reward
from the country, North and South,” than to be cheated of his rights. 13

After the bill passed, disgruntled Mugwump opponents defeated Lodge’s
bid for election as overseer at Harvard. Loyal Republicans rallied to his side.
Curtis Guild Jr., later the governor but then working with his father on the
Commercial Bulletin, condemned the “little knot of Mugwumps bitter in de¬
feat [at the House passage of the election bill] indulging in puerile revenge.”
Curtis Guild Sr. assured Lodge that he was following in the footsteps of
former Massachusetts congressmen later elevated to the Senate. Albert Bush-
nell Hart of the Harvard history department affirmed that the bill was consti¬
tutional and deserved to pass in the Senate. In the fall, Benjamin R. Curtis,
a descendant of the moderate former Supreme Court Justice who dissented
in the Dred Scott decision, assured Lodge of his backing. 14

Throughout the spring, the Republican press campaigned for the bill as
well. The Boston Advertiser , which had been purchased by a group of party
men headed by Lodge, was edited by William E. Barrett and functioned as a

36 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

party organ. Virtually Lodge’s personal mouthpiece, it reprinted the entire
oration, which was “the talk of the capital.” That same day it editorialized
against a Georgia white supremacist who opposed Negro education. The
following day it disputed the Mugwump-oriented Boston Herald , which la¬
mented that nothing could be done about election fraud. To drive home the
point that something must be done about conditions in the South, the Adver¬
tiser ran a page-one story about a Louisiana black man killed by a mob of two
hundred whites when it was alleged that he was storing guns. 15 The Boston
Journal , edited by W. W. Clapp, oriented more to the “Half-Breed” camp of
Senator Hoar, falling between the Stalwarts and the Mugwump Liberals.
The Journal saw the Lodge bill as an extension of the secret ballot. “It is in
effect an application to Congressional elections of the principle of genuine
ballot reform which are embodied in the legislation of this and several other
states.” 16

After a hot debate on the floor, the Lodge bill passed by a strict party vote
of 155 to 149 with 24 abstentions. One southern Union Laborite voted in favor
and two Republicans defected. In the Senate, however, there were no rules
to keep the Republican caucus in line and no equivalent to “Czar” Reed.
Senator Hoar had to confront a more formidable opposition than did Con¬
gressman Lodge. 17

AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLITICS

Well aware of the difficulties the bill would face in the Senate, Boston’s
African-Americans rallied to the bill’s support in the summer of 1890. As we
have earlier noted, this community had a proud political heritage that dated
back to the colonial period. After the Civil War, at least one African-Ameri¬
can always served in the General Court (the state legislature) or the City
Council. In addition, black Bostonians received some small political patron¬
age in the form of appointive office. African-Americans generally voted over¬
whelmingly Republican, although a handful of leaders espoused political
independence and could be found, to varying degrees, within the Democratic
camp.

Political divisions in Boston reflected differing strategies within the na¬
tional African-American polity. Frederick Douglass remained the most au¬
thoritative national leader until his death in 1895, and his antebellum sojourn
in Massachusetts probably increased his influence in Boston. Douglass urged
African-Americans to stay with the Republican Party and served in appoint¬
ive office, but he criticized Republican backsliding. Other leaders, such as
Timothy Thomas Fortune, editor of the New York Age , advocated political

The Federal Elections Bill of 1890 37

independence and a divided vote. During the struggle for the Lodge bill,
however, Fortune joined Douglass in the Republican camp. 18

In January 1890, Fortune called the first convention of the National Afro-
American League, which 141 delegates attended in Chicago. This meeting
announced a strong civil rights perspective, naming as its first priority the
defense of black voting rights in the South, and affirming a nonpartisan polit¬
ical stance. The only Massachusetts man to sign the convention call was J.
Gordon Street, future editor of Boston’s soon-to-appear race weekly, the
Courant , and the only state delegate was Joshua A. Brockett of Cambridge’s
St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church. Brockett became chairperson
of the Cambridge Colored National League and Edwin G. Walker, son of
abolitionist David Walker and a key leader of the community despite his
Democratic sympathies, led the Boston group. 19

A second convention, held in Washington, D.C., in February, seemed
more important to Boston leaders. They held a conference of their own to
elect eighteen delegates to this meeting, at which was founded the Citizens’
Equal Rights Association. While most of these delegates did not actually
attend the Washington convention, two Bostonians played prominent roles
there: W. H. Dupree served as convention vice president, and Julius C.
Chappelle, a former state legislator, chaired the resolutions committee. More
than four hundred delegates attended this meeting, which was older in com¬
position than the Chicago gathering, had more politicians in attendance, and
was apparently somewhat more conservative. These delegates too declared
for civil rights, but also spoke of the need for economic progress and self-
help. Despite some obscure controversy in Boston about the convention’s
work, Butler Wilson, reporting the meeting in the New York Age , approved
the Washington group’s commitment to the Blair education bill and congres¬
sional efforts to defend southern black voting rights. The fact that Boston
elected Edwin Walker a delegate to the meeting, and that J. C. Price, presi¬
dent of Fortune’s League, chaired the Washington gathering, suggests that
no fundamental principles divided the two organizations. In Boston, they
cooperated during the following year. 20

Around the same time, Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady spoke in
Boston before prominent businessmen, arguing that the issues of the Civil
War were now definitively over. The black community and its neo-abolition¬
ist allies brought a thousand people to a Tremont Temple meeting to rebut
Grady’s portrayal of southern racial harmony and progress. The Reverends
A. A. Miner, Alexander Crummell, and Joshua A. Brockett insisted that
Grady had painted over the real problems. William Lloyd Garrison II sent a
letter to the meeting, arguing that Grady’s death immediately after the speech

38 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

had softened reaction against his white supremacist views. In the New York
Age , Butler Wilson contrasted the elevation of Maria Baldwin, an African-
American teacher, to school principal in a mostly white school, to Grady’s
presentation of blacks as best fit for menial jobs. Fortune, in the editorial
column, called Grady the legitimate heir to the former president of the Con¬
federacy, Jefferson Davis. 21

This all-out attack on a representative of the Democrats did not preclude
displeasure with local Republicans. In the 1889 local elections, the Republi¬
cans had swept aside the Democrats, and two African-Americans—Charles
E. Harris of the West End’s Ward Nine and Paul C. Brooks from a South
End ward that in 1890 was less than 5 percent black—were elected to the city
council. However, according to Butler Wilson, neither Republican Mayor
Thomas Hart nor Governor John Quincy Adams Brackett sufficiently re¬
warded black voters with patronage appointments. Democratic Mayor Hugh
O’Brien and Democratic Governor Benjamin Butler had equal or better re¬
cords. Republican failure to appoint a colored man was “stupid and danger¬
ous”; now that white Republicans were bolting the party, so might colored
men. 22

In the summer, both black community groups turned their attention to the
elections bill pending in the Senate. The Colored National League invited
Captain Nathan Appleton, a white Brahmin veteran, to their conference,
who declared that a fair ballot at the South should be “enforced by gunpoint if
necessary.” Meanwhile, a state meeting of the Massachusetts Citizens’ Equal
Rights Association held at Worcester resolved its solidarity with the Colored
National League and hoped for a merger. Together they called a Faneuil Hall
rally for 1 August. 23

Five hundred people responded eagerly to the summons. Chairman Julius
C. Chappelle of the Equal Rights Association declared that colored Ameri¬
cans should have been guaranteed voting rights at the end of the war. Edwin
G. Walker, probably the leading African-American Democrat in the state,
said that “the best men of today are found in the Republican party and be¬
cause there are in that party men who are dishonest, I do not censure the
whole party.” Three black politicians presented a resolution endorsing the
Lodge bill, which the meeting adopted. African-American attorney Edward
Everett Brown, Courant editor J. Gordon Street, and others spoke as well.

White neo-abolitionists delivered stirring orations also. Norwood P. Hal-
lowell, a “fighting Quaker” officer in the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, ar¬
raigned the various northern opponents of the bill. He castigated merchants
who feared the threatened southern economic boycott and tariff reformers
who placed their business interests above civil rights. The civil service reform-

The Federal Elections Bill of 1890 39

ers (here he meant the Mugwumps) failed to see that a free ballot would
encourage honest government, not retard it. The veteran's kinsman Richard
P. Hallowell pointed to the Wendell Phillips portrait on the wall and dramat¬
ically declared that if Phillips could speak, he would denounce the Mug¬
wumps as latter-day doughfaces. He later sent a journalistic account of the
meeting to Senator Hoar, along with a petition backing the bill . 24 The meet¬
ing showed the ability of black and white activists to work together, and
the independence of African-American politicians from strict party politics.
Walkers presence and the choice of the nonpolitician Hallowells showed that
this was not simply a Republican rally.

Chappelle was a South Carolina migrant who had worked as a barber by
day and studied by night to earn a high school degree. Elected to the Boston
City Council and the state Republican committee, he served in the legislature
from 1883 to 1886. There he sponsored Progressive legislation to eliminate
the Massachusetts poll tax, regulate child and female labor, and provide free
textbooks in the public schools and free evening high schools. He was the
prime legislative mover on the Boston Massacre/Crispus Attucks statue.
Chappelle worked within the main line of African-American politics, in the
spirit of Frederick Douglass, and certainly best represented the community's
sentiments at the meeting. 25

By contrast, Walker was a native Bostonian, the son of the fiery abolitionist
David Walker. As a young man he owned a leather shop that employed
fifteen workers. Through participation in the antebellum freedom struggle he
developed an interest in the law and won prominence as an attorney. In 1866
he became the first African-American to be elected to a state legislature.
Although he won office as a Republican, he soon switched allegiance to the
Democrats. Perhaps his mainly Irish clientele as an attorney influenced his
decision. Walker admired Irish revolutionary leaders, was the only African-
American to speak at the memorial to poet John Boyle O'Reilly, and was
even admitted to an Irish lodge. He campaigned for Yankee Democrat Benja¬
min Butler, who appointed him a municipal judge, but Republicans blocked
his nomination. About sixty years old at the time of the 1890 meeting, Walk¬
er’s Democratic loyalties reflected the peculiarities of Boston racial politics.
His vigorous support of the Lodge bill showed him to be no Democratic
pawn either. In 1896, five years before his death, he almost ran for president
as an independent candidate. 26

This enthusiastic rally combined with two other events in August that
marked a high point of good feeling in a community whose state leaders were
at the head of the congressional civil rights battle. For the first time, the
Grand Army of the Republic held its annual encampment in a festive and

40 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

elaborately decorated Boston. Soldiers paraded in the streets and ships passed
in review in the harbor. About twenty African-American veterans' posts
marched in the parade, including two from Massachusetts. The men of the
54th and 55th Regiments staged their own campfire, led by William H.
Dupree, James Monroe Trotter, Charles L. Mitchell, and Charles Lenox.
The celebration clearly encouraged the sense that racial harmony prevailed in
the city. Then came an unrelated court ruling in the case of a black man who
assaulted a white man, after the latter had racially taunted him. The law, the
judge found, compelled a guilty verdict, but justice was on the defendant’s
side. The black man was fined one penny. “This is justice meted out in
Massachusetts," exulted the New York Age. “We hope to see the time when
the colored man will be treated as well elsewhere.” 27

As the November election neared, African-American leaders urged the
ranks to turn out for the Republicans. Frederick Douglass, speaking in Bos¬
ton at an abolitionist reunion, led the way. With him on the platform was
George T. Downing of Newport, Rhode Island, a leading Independent. In
New York, Fortune urged the Republicans to run a straight-out ticket and
defeat the foe. Bostonians urged a vote for congressional candidate Edward
L. Pierce, a Civil War veteran and friend of Sumner’s, who had donated a
library to Sea Island freedpeople . 28 The ensuing events, however, undermined
politics as a medium of struggle for black Bostonians.

THE BILL FAILS IN THE SENATE

If George Frisbie Hoar cannot be strictly classified as a Boston Brahmin it is
only because he had moved from his native Concord to practice law and
politics in Worcester. His paternal ancestry could be traced to early Puritan
settlers. His father had been a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, and was
once violently expelled from South Carolina while on a mission on behalf of
African-American seamen. His maternal grandfather was Roger Sherman, a
signer of the Declaration of Independence. Hoar himself, born in 1826, stud¬
ied at Harvard and worshiped as a Unitarian. 29

His father and elder brother were early members of the Free Soil Party.
George Frisbie Hoar was a member of the new party too, and later a leader
of the Kansas Emigrant Aid Society and the Republican Party. His political
idol was Charles Sumner, whose policies he followed throughout the 1850s
and 1860s. He won election to the Massachusetts House in 1852 and the U.S.
Congress in 1868, where he served four terms until the General Court chose
him for the Senate. Hoar was a Radical Republican on sectional questions,
but an opponent of spoils politics, a combination of views that placed him in

The Federal Elections Bill of 1890 41

die camp of Republican “Half Breeds,” along with such men as future presi¬
dents Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison. Support for civil rights
was alive in Hoar as it was in no other senator in 1890. Sixty-four years old
in that year, he was the last man of the 1848 Free Soil movement serving in
die Senate when he died in 1904. His tenure was marked by strong advocacy
for a variety of social reforms, and conservative positions on economic issues
such as the tariff and currency. He was the right senator to lead the fight on
the elections bill. 30

Despite the Republican Senate majority, Hoar was nervous about the fate
of the bill even before the November election. As early as August, the major¬
ity of ten seemed fragile. “I am more anxious and disturbed about the political
situation than I have ever been before in my life,” Hoar confided to a friend.
This was a strong statement from a political veteran of the Civil War and
Reconstruction. 31 As Hoar feared, Republican Stalwart politicians under the
leadership of Pennsylvania’s Matthew S. Quay wanted to give precedence to
the tariff and postpone the elections bill until the second session of Congress,
commencing in December. Only after all but one Republican agreed to give
the bill priority in December did Hoar consent. The four-month delay, how¬
ever, gave the Democratic South and its allies a chance to regroup. During
the break, the Atlanta Constitution threatened a southern boycott of northern
products if the Lodge bill passed. Northern businessmen became alarmed,
and began pressuring their senators to vote nay. Senators from New York,
Nebraska, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island voiced skepticism
about the bill. Republican ranks began to crumble. 32

Massachusetts businessmen showed little interest in the bill. The over¬
whelming concern of Hoar’s business correspondents was with the tariff, and
generally only as it affected their product. Alone, the Home Market Club
linked the tariff and the election bill as complementary and equally deserving
of the approbation of manufacturers. “Indeed, a protective tariff, or any other
wholesome measure, can have but an uncertain tenure unless the freedom and
purity of elections can be guaranteed,” club secretary Albert Clark observed . 33

Some southern Republicans, formerly northerners, wrote to Hoar of their
fears. About 130 citizens of Anniston, Alabama, “recently removed from the
Northern and Western states,” sent a remonstrance against the bill, protesting
that it would hurt the Republican Party, and their own business as Yankee
merchants and artisans. A former Worcester Republican, now living in Flor¬
ida, spelled out the underlying white fear: Negro “domination,” which simply
meant that black men might win office. The correspondent, however,
thought it the better part of valor to accept the wishes of the native southern
whites. Hoar also heard from courageous southerners, black and white, who

42 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

backed him, but now that the stakes were higher it was obvious that pressure
was mounting against the bill among southern Republicans of northern back¬
ground, who might have been counted upon for support . 34

When the Senate reconvened in December, the Democrats mounted a
delaying filibuster. Hoar delivered an impassioned rebuttal on 29--30 Decem¬
ber, but oratory swayed no senatorial votes. In early January two silver state
senators joined the Democratic effort to set the elections bill aside. Hoar and
his remaining allies could not muster enough votes to bring the bill back to
the floor, and by 26 January, it was dead. A coalition of southern Democrats,
northern businessmen and machine politicians, Mugwumps, and silver sena¬
tors defeated the Federal Elections bill in the Senate. 35

In Massachusetts, the effect on the Brahmins who had championed black
voting rights was powerful. Lodge was bitter about the bill's defeat in the
Senate. When a Missouri congressman attacked him on the issue in the after-
math, he delivered a stinging rebuke. He never addressed the suffrage ques¬
tion again, even during the years of Republican resurgence. W. E. Barrett,
editor of the Boston Journal and now Speaker of the Massachusetts House,
urged the state’s Republicans to abandon the elections bill and turn to new
issues. Massachusetts Republicans should campaign to develop the state’s
public schools, and compromise on the tariff The Republican Party in the
South was a dead letter. Implicit in Barrett’s assessment was an abandonment
of black rights . 36 Hoar’s biographer concludes that “in Hoar’s public career
the conflict over the elections bill marked a definite turning point .” 37 This
was the last time that Hoar, Lodge, the Republicans, or Massachusetts would
lead an idealistic crusade for the African-American in Congress. There was
little now for the Brahmins to do but look on, either indifferently or aghast,
at the new rise of codified racism in the South, and discourse favorably on
the concomitant ascension of Booker T. Washington to the role of unofficial
spokesman for the race.

BRAHMINS AGAINST A “FORCE BILL”

Within Massachusetts, Brahmin opposition to Lodge’s bill was more vigor¬
ously expressed by the newspapers than by politicians. Democratic and Mug¬
wump candidates understood that the issue did not interest their voters. For
the Democrats in 1890, a downward revision of the tariff was the key ques¬
tion. Mugwumps, as usual, pushed for civil service reform. The Democrats
won a sweeping victory in 1890 behind the brilliant campaign oratory of Wil¬
liam Eustis Russell, who argued for sectional reconciliation and ignored civil
rights. The Boston Globe , committed to the Democratic faction loyal to for-

The Federal Elections Bill of 1890 43

mer president Grover Cleveland, took up the attack on Lodge’s bill. Mug¬
wump politicians won several congressional seats, but as they generally
concerned themselves with local issues, we shall briefly discuss Thomas
Wentworth Higginson as the representative man of this group on race rela¬
tions. In print, the Boston Evening Transcript spoke for the divided conscience
of the backsliding Brahmin racial liberals.

The national Democratic view of the race question was dramatically ex¬
pressed in Boston by Atlanta Constitution editor Henry W. Grady in a 12
December 1889 speech before the Boston Merchants’ Association. An earnest
exponent of southern industrialism and alliance with northern capital, Grady
understood that a prerequisite for sectional harmony was the elimination of
the race problem from politics. Speaking with former president Cleveland,
Andrew Carnegie, and others, Grady acknowledged the difficulty of present¬
ing his case in the home of Wendell Phillips and Charles Sumner. He re¬
minded his listeners that although both sections had been stained by slavery,
whose passing he was glad of, it had in fact been a civilizing mission that
brought happiness to the savage. Now the line between North and South was
“but a vanishing shadow.” The (white) South faced the difficult problem of
living side by side with a “kindly and dependent race,” which it could do only
with the North’s help. The Negro was making determined economic prog¬
ress, owning $10 million of property in Georgia. While black citizens paid
one-thirtieth the taxes of whites, they received half the educational services.
Artisan trade was more open to the southern Negro than the northern, Grady
asserted. Yet, it would mock democracy if “ignorant and purchasable votes,”
easily swayed by demagogues, were to rule by force of numbers over the
whites. “The negro vote can never control in the South, and it would be well
if partisans at the North would understand this.” The editor was sure that his
revered “old black mammy” was herself looking down from heaven to bless
this course. He concluded with a moving peroration exalting American na¬
tionalism, a future without sectionalism, and the divine mission of the United
States to advance democracy. Even the Republican Boston Journal, which
editorially questioned the veracity of Grady’s remarks, headlined its story
“Editor Grady Brings Tears to the Eyes of His Auditors.” 38

Grady’s untimely death at age thirty-nine a few days later, after his return
to Atlanta, further softened the feelings of Bostonians for white southerners.
The Journal praised him, suggesting that he would have been a congressman
had he lived. The Democratic Boston Post noted that Grady’s last speech was
given at Plymouth Rock and compared his eloquence to that of Wendell
Phillips. He had had a profound effect upon the industrial development of
his section and the nation, the paper concluded. The Journal, however, also

44 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

ran a reminiscence by its Washington correspondent, upon whom Grady had
called while en route to Boston. This writer noted that Grady’s mood had
been full of foreboding regarding race relations. He had recently protested a
white invasion of an African-American residential district near Atlanta, dur¬
ing which black men had been flogged. He feared that “vicious colored lead¬
ers” might instigate a race riot. The Journal thus implied that Grady knew all
along that a storm of race hatred was gathering in the South. 39

Among the honored guests at the Merchants' Association banquet was
former Cambridge mayor William E. Russell, unsuccessful Democratic can¬
didate for governor in the last two elections. The youthful Russell was a
descendant of early Puritan settlers, and a graduate of Harvard and the Bos¬
ton University Law School, where his father was on the faculty. His tenure
as mayor in the mid-i88os had been marked by efficiency in government,
budget balancing, and increased municipal services. He was one of the rare
Brahmin politicians of either party who possessed a genuinely democratic
temperament. Despite some friction with municipal unions, he crafted a
working alliance with Irish leaders in Boston and Cambridge, and had only
narrowly missed election in the recent gubernatorial race. 40

In February 1890, he repaid Grady’s visit to Boston by bringing a party of
thirteen businessmen to Atlanta’s first Chamber of Commerce meeting.
Grady’s last letter, written to a Georgia colleague, had praised Russell, who
apparently agreed to the trip during the editor’s Boston sojourn. Russell pro¬
ceeded to deliver a northerner’s version of Grady’s speech to his southern
audience, celebrating the industrial growth of the South and the possibilities
for commercial exchange. The role of government was to facilitate this proc¬
ess. In his only oblique reference to the rights of African-Americans, Russell
extolled the Supreme Court for undoing “much legislation founded upon
sectional prejudice and enacted for sectional or partisan purposes.” Youth was
a key theme of the address: Russell and his generation, who had been children
during the Civil War, would look not to the past but to the future. He con¬
cluded by calling for reform of the ballot (meaning the secret ballot, not
Lodge’s bill), civil service, and tariff. Upon his return to Boston, Russell
assured the manufacturer Edward Atkinson that race relations in the South
were in fact harmonious. 41

A few months later, Russell, still in his early thirties, launched his third
campaign for governor. The Massachusetts Democrats were experiencing a
hopeful revival as the Lodge bill was launched. The party’s rising fortunes
were based on the confluence of inflation and Republican high tariff policies;
Russell and Democratic congressional candidates addressed these pocketbook
issues and said little about the Lodge bill. The Boston Globe , however, under

The Federal Elections Bill of 1890 45

the ownership of Charles H. Taylor and his sons, campaigned enthusiastically
against the bill. Taylor and Russell were political allies in the Grover Cleve¬
land wing of the party, and Taylor served on Russell’s staff after the latter was
elected governor. 42

The Globe portrayed any federal attempt to regulate the elections as mere
sectionalism and partisanship. While Lodge was planning his tactics in the
House, New Hampshire Senator William E. Chandler was formulating a
similar measure in the upper chamber. “No Revival of Sectionalism Wanted,”
the Globe warned in an early attempt to head off reform. The “insult” to the
South would jeopardize southern votes for an American site for the World’s
Fair. Northern talk of ballot reform was simply a cover for a power grab that
would give the captains of industry the high tariff rates they craved. 43

When the bill emerged in the House, the Globe blasted it as part of the
Republican campaign to stifle the Democratic House minority by tightening
rules of procedure. The “Force Bill” was a conspiracy by House Speaker
Thomas Reed and Lodge to enforce Republican rule. Waving aside the no¬
tion that most Negroes voted Republican, the Globe derided the federal in¬
spectors that the bill would send southward as Republicans with police
powers. “Never has legislation been carried on with such high-handed audac¬
ity,” the Globe alleged, as it was in Congress under “dictator” Reed. 44

Not only was the bill unfair; it would also cost the voters a fortune to
enforce. To pay for the “Army of 300,000 Republicans” ready to descend
upon the South would cost $16 million, a lead headline declared. In rebuttal,
Lodge estimated that there were 140 election precincts per congressional dis¬
trict. His bill mandated three inspectors for each precinct when an election
was challenged. He further estimated only twenty challenges. Rounding off
the arithmetic to produce a lower figure, Lodge foresaw eight thousand su¬
pervisors per election. The Globe reporter countered that every district in the
country would see a challenge. Furthermore, Lodge had neglected to count
the cost of three deputy marshals who would accompany the three inspectors.
With 330 congressional districts, at a cost of $50,000 per district, the country
would indeed require 300,000 inspectors and marshals at a cost of sixteen
million dollars. 45

The accuracy of either side’s self-serving predictions cannot be reckoned.
What was more revealing was the Globe s threat to pervert the intent of the
bill by pressing spurious challenges. “The way to make a bad law odious is to
enforce it,” the editors declared. The Democratic Party itself would not stoop
so low, the editors thought, but slyly surmised that “one hundred cranks”
could be found in each district to challenge even the most lopsided of elec-

46 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

tions. The federal inspectors would work every district, Congressman Lodge's
not excepted . 46

When the bill passed the House, the Globe predicted that the voters would
provide the ultimate chastisement in November. In the South, white voters
fearing Negro domination, even if that fear was unjustified, would flock to
the Democratic standard. Northerners too, would feel “disgust” if “the bill to
promote fraud” became law. The Globe foresaw that “this will be a democratic
tidal wave year, like 1882 and 1874.” 47

The Mugwump tendency was less cohesive than even that of the fractious
Democratic Party. Politically heterogeneous and always in motion, its roots
lay in the Liberal Republican revolt against President Grant. Independents
cared mainly about civil service reform and the corrupting effect of the spoils
system upon government. They gradually set aside Reconstruction issues.
Mugwump disgust with the Blaine nomination in 1884 led to a hot fight in
the Massachusetts Republican Party, whose bad feelings lingered past 1890.
Lodge was on the receiving end of this antagonism. Independents with politi¬
cal ambitions of their own had reason to resent a man they perceived as a
political opportunist.

However, the Mugwumps suffered from an elitism that was politically
paralyzing. It was a much-remarked-upon phenomenon of the time that men
of the upper class were withdrawing from politics, which was becoming in¬
creasingly ungentlemanly. According to Geoffrey Blodgett, the Mugwumps
were “college-bred, Protestant, urban and middle class.” They held a wide
range of views on economic questions, agreeing only on civil service reform.
While they did not possess great voting strength, they were sometimes fi¬
nancially powerful and always articulate. Among the wealthy in this circle
were John Murray Forbes, Boston’s most powerful capitalist; Robert Treat
Paine, philanthropist; investment house heads Henry Lee and Henry Lee
Higginson; and Charles Cabot Jackson, Martin Brimmer, and Charles Fran¬
cis Adams. Academics supporting Independent policies included Charles
Eliot Norton, William James, and Charles W. Eliot. Moorfield Storey,
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and John F. Andrew, son of the Civil War
governor, were other prominent leaders . 48

Independents also held a range of views on civil rights. No individual,
however, exemplified the retreat of this milieu more dramatically than
Thomas Wentworth Higginson. A descendant of Puritan divines, he himself
became a Unitarian minister of radical proclivities. In the antebellum period
he was the architect of daring plans to free fugitive slaves from federal hands.
He joined the financial backers of John Brown and was the most steadfast of
the “Secret Six,” the only one who was convinced that Brown’s plan might

The Federal Elections Bill of 1890 47

work, and the only man to stand his ground after Brown was caught and his
incriminating papers found. During the Civil War, he commanded a regi¬
ment of South Carolina freedmen. Army Life in a Black Regiment , his postwar
account of that experience, testified to the fighting capabilities and great
courage of the African-American combatants, although its paternalist as¬
sumptions were all too common in 1870. During Reconstruction, which he at
first ardently supported, he began to lead a literary and contemplative life.
Along with this change in his personal routine came new doubts about how
the freedpeople would advance themselves. Higginson participated in the
Liberal Republican campaign that relegated African-American rights to sec¬
ond place behind civil service reform. In this spirit he unsuccessfully ran for
Congress in 1888 as an independent Democrat. This ideological journey was
typical for men of Mugwump stripe, but Higginson’s case is the most pro¬
nounced because of his outstanding record as an abolitionist and his unique
Civil War experience. If any Boston Brahmin could have been expected to
speak out for civil rights until his dying breath, it was Higginson, but he
reflected too much the mood of his social group and time by 1890. 49

This mood was put in print daily by the Boston Evening Transcript . The
newspaper was founded in 1830 by Henry Worthington Dutton, a poor boy
from western Massachusetts, and Lynde Minshull Walter, a Harvard-edu¬
cated Episcopalian. In the antebellum period, the paper followed the line of
Boston's Cotton Whigs—generally antislavery but also anti-abolitionist. The
paper supported conservative Whiggery until Daniel Webster’s Seventh of
March 1850 speech, and then gradually toughened its antislavery stance, sup¬
porting Abraham Lincoln in i860. 50

The original owners gave the editorial staff considerable leeway and the
Dutton family continued this policy throughout the century. In 1881, Edward
Henry Clement, the son of a mercantile family, assumed the editorship.
Clement was raised with abolitionist ideas and served William Tecumseh
Sherman during the Civil War as a journalist after the capture of Savannah.
Like Henry Cabot Lodge, Clement was a Republican who voted for Tilden
in 1876; unlike Lodge, however, he opposed Blaine in 1884. A low tariff man,
he supported Cleveland several times against Republicans. Clement took an
active interest in questions regarding African-Americans and sought to ad¬
vance the race’s interests, as he understood them, as editor . 51

The Transcript's opposition to the Lodge bill thus reflected and reinforced
the retreat of the Brahmin elite from confronting the South on its increas-
ingly restrictive racial policies. Nevertheless, a certain ambiguity pervaded
Clement’s argument and he sometimes seemed uncomfortable with his own
conclusions. The newspaper’s vacillation displayed the fading of the civil

48 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

rights dream in the Brahmin mind, like a light flaring uncertainly before it
flickered out.

The Transcript embraced President Benjamin Harrison’s 2 December 1889
speech that signaled a new direction on southern policy, although it did not
comment directly on that small section of the address. When Jefferson Davis
died a few days later, Clement contrasted the South’s progress to Davis’s
reactionary vision. Toward the end of the month, after Henry Grady died,
Clement observed that most northerners disagreed with the editor, but re¬
spected him. “He saw Negroes as hewers of wood, but did not countenance
outrages against them, and took risks to denounce them.” Unlike Grady,
Clement respectfully advocated the social equality of the Negro. At the same
time, he downplayed the political struggle, vowing that in this “new social
crusade,” Bostonians “will again be found ... in the forefront of radical and
hopeful opinion.” 52

In concrete terms, the “new social crusade” meant that Clement was ready
to abandon the old civil rights crusade. When Henry Cabot Lodge an¬
nounced an intention to protect the ballot in the South, the Transcript de¬
murred. Lodge, the editor protested, was misreading lessons he should have
learned as an historian of federalism. Congressional elections were actually
state elections. Just as the people of Massachusetts would resent federal su¬
pervision of their elections, so should the good people of the South. As for
African-Americans, the Transcript rosily foresaw a gradual elevation of the
Negro from his bondage to ignorance, and a concomitant lessening of racial
tension in the South. The Blair education bill, therefore, did earn the news¬
paper’s praise. 53

Toward the Lodge bill, the Transcript observed a discreet silence at first.
As the House vote drew nearer, Clement could comment only abstractly.
“The public will draw its own conclusions as to the extent party politics or a
real desire for fair and pure elections dominates” considerations regarding the
bill, he mused. The Congress would be on “doubtful ground” to pass the bill,
but it was constitutional. If the Negroes were in fact Democrats, as southern
Democrats claimed, then the bill “will serve to dissipate a prevalent error at
the North, and so promote harmony and friendship between the sections.”
At best, his position was agnostic. 54

Then the bill passed the House, and Clement turned against it. Now he
predicted that “the short-lived infant” would be strangled in the Senate. The
bill was “a monument... of misplaced energy and maladroit strategy on the
part of Speaker Reed, Congressman Lodge, and others.” Then in August,
when this prediction seemed accurate, Clement grew mournful about his
impending victory. He regretted that the “New Republican Party, which has

The Federal Elections Bill of 1890 49

taken the tariff idol, that Lincoln and Sumner knew not, for its fetish. Penn¬
sylvania leads now, the New England ideal is disestablished.” Five months
later, when the bill failed to come to a vote, the newspaper seemed more
grim than gratified. In an editorial that did not mention African-Americans,
Clement concluded that the bill had been nothing but “partisan legislation”
that flew in the face of public opinion . 55

The November Election

Between the House and Senate votes came the November election, and in
the nation’s economic difficulties, the hopes of challengers soared. Mugwump
independents running for Congress as Democrats included John F. Andrew,
son of the Civil War governor, George Fred Williams, and Sherman Hoar,
nephew of the senator. The North Shore Democrats could find no one to
run against Lodge, so they imported William Everett, son of the famed orator
Edward Everett, from Quincy. Everett the younger was a Harvard faculty
member who lived in genteel poverty and relative obscurity . 56

The Lynn City Item , a Republican paper, took the Democrats’ choice of
Everett as a “confession of weakness.” Everett was clearly “a sacrificial lamb”
doing noble party duty, but destined for defeat. Lodge had handily drubbed
his last opponent by five thousand votes. In addition, Lodge’s friend and ally
Reed had won a whopping victory in a special Maine election, speaking out
on behalf of the voting rights bill during the campaign . 57

Lodge nevertheless ran hard, and proudly proclaimed his role as shaper of
the elections bill. At the Sixth District Republican convention, speaking be¬
fore a large audience, he won the heartiest applause when he championed fair
elections and political morality. In another speech the same day he blasted
those who deserted the Republicans for “the party of hatred.” The country
“owe[s] to the Negro the protection which the Constitution has pledged to
him,” Lodge insisted, and charged that his opponents could only fear reform
if they had something to hide. Massachusetts had led the way in the antislav¬
ery struggle and the Civil War; the state had the best and earliest fair elections
bill itself. As Massachusetts had led in those crusades, so she led now. The
issue was more important than the tariff or currency questions. Lodge ended
with classic “bloody shirt” rhetoric, but the passion that he displayed on the
question reflected genuine commitment and flowed out of the man’s upbring¬
ing, education, and life experience . 58

Lodge, of course, did not campaign as a single-issue candidate. He de¬
fended the whole range of Republican issues, including the recently passed
McKinley tariff, the House Rules reform that strengthened the Speaker, a

50 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

big Navy, immigration restriction, veterans’ benefits, and his ability to bring
home the federal bacon. Democratic opponent Everett attacked him on the
tariff, House Rules changes, and the elections bill. Democratic gubernatoral
candidate Russell claimed that Lodge had sacrificed New England’s interests
to the protectionist manufacturers of Pennsylvania. The Globe denounced
Lodge’s bill as “a sort of perpetual Hayes-Tilden, 8-7 counting out fraud.”
The voters should defeat Lodge, or at least reduce his majority, to send a
message that the country did not want the bill. 59

The voters did send a message, but on which issue? Lodge barely squeaked
past Everett, winning 14,558 votes to Everett’s 13,562 with 997 for the Prohibi¬
tionist. The Democrats added four new congressmen, including Mugwumps
Andrew, Williams, and Hoar. Russell resoundingly defeated governor John
Quincy Adams Brackett. Nationally the Republicans suffered their worst de¬
feat since the Civil War, losing control of the House. 60

Lodge and Hoar put the best possible face on the loss. The congressman
bravely acknowledged the extent of the defeat, and blamed it on “one cause,
the passage of the tariff bill . . . and the skilfully managed scare about high
prices.” He accepted his lower vote total as a warning for him on the tariff.
“As to the election bill, if that had been the issue the result in Massachusetts
would have been very different, for the people of this state will always sustain
measures for honest elections.” He vowed adherence to the principle of the
bill and predicted that its promise would one day be fulfilled . 61

Hoar claimed the result was but an exaggeration of the usual midterm
check on the presidency, a process that had gone on for sixty-six years and
signified little. Actually, the longer term trends showed that the Democrats
had little to celebrate, Hoar thought. The South comprised sixteen of thirty-
seven states in 1874, but today seven new states had no slave past. In addition,
the northern Democrats, while refusing to support the elections bill, never
defended actual southern elections, “those Isthmian games of murder and
fraud.” In his standard stump speech, Hoar argued that the South had stolen
some thirty-nine to sixty congressional seats at the last election, and that the
vote of one southerner counted as ten votes in Massachusetts. Ultimately,
Democratic currency policies would work against the Democrats, for “the
party of the clipped dollar and the party of clipped citizenship are the same.” 62

For black residents, even the Boston atmosphere seemed to change. Where
once harmony apparently reigned, now threats of exclusion appeared on all
sides. At the New England Conservatory, southern white students demanded
that two African-American women be barred from dormitories. One of
these, Maud Cuney, would not give in. The Colored National League threat¬
ened to sue, and the conservatory rebuffed the southerners. Next a black

The Federal Elections Bill of 1890 51

woman was kept out of a restaurant. A South Boston resident suddenly found
evidence that Crispus Attucks had not been killed at the Boston Massacre
after all. At Phillips Exeter Academy, southern students objected to the
choice of a black student as class orator. These unrelated cases of white hostil¬
ity, following so swiftly upon the heels of the Democratic victory, suggest
either a new boldness on the part of racists, or a new awareness by the Ages
Boston correspondent of the significance of episodes he might previously
have dismissed . 63

Failure is often the occasion for recrimination, and the defeat of the Lodge
bill inspired that as well. When Massachusetts Republican leader William E.
Barrett called upon his party to forget old issues like the race problem in the
South, Courant editor Street urged black voters to turn against Barrett when
he ran again. “What kind of martyr’s crown are you bidding for, Editor
Street?” an angry Timothy Fortune objected. A few months later Street ap¬
parently departed from the Courant, which now vowed to be a “dignified
and sensible ally of the Age” Fortune was more forgiving toward a youthful
Harvardian who felt that “the [white] South has some excuse for its present
attitude” toward black voting rights. The Harvard man said that “a good
many of our people south of Mason and Dixon’s line are not fit for the
responsibilities of republican government.” Fortune dismissed this as “hum¬
bug” but predicted, correctly, that the youthful W. E. B. Du Bois would
change his opinions with experience . 64

Despite this brave rhetoric, the national and state Democratic victories
surely encouraged the bill’s defeat in the Senate. The Globe observed that
“Mr. Lodge and Senator Hoar are informed that their state is not with them
in their effort to revive sectionalism,” and even the Lynn City Item attributed
Lodge’s low vote to “northern doughfaces,” a tacit admission that the tally
hinged in part on his bill. It is more likely, however, that the bill played little
part in the state election and only a secondary role in Lodge’s district; the
tariff and state issues were probably more important . 65

Henry Cabot Lodge never again expressed interest in African-American
rights. Elected to the Senate in 1893, he turned his attention to immigration
restriction and foreign policy. Both these issues inclined Lodge to racialist
thinking. His friendship with Theodore Roosevelt deepened this tendency.
When President Roosevelt discharged African-American soldiers from the
Army after the Brownsville, Texas, incident of August 1906, Boston’s black
community excoriated the president’s ally in the Senate. Nothing more dra¬
matically symbolized the Brahmin retreat than the evolution of Lodge’s posi¬
tion from 1890 to 1906.

52 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

All along, Lodge had been a racialist on the immigration question. Like
Henry Adams and others, he advanced the theory that democracy was a
special attribute of the Anglo-Saxon “race,” and that other “races” did not
possess its peculiar virtues. In the late 1890s, he advocated a literacy test as a
means to keep out immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. 66

Lodge was also a staunch interventionist in the buildup to the Spanish-
American War, an advocate of annexation of the islands won from Spain, and
the architect of a coverup of American atrocities in the Philippines during the
war to secure American control there. In Boston, Mugwumps formed the
core of the antiwar campaign, with Senator Hoar allied to their position. As
Senate chairman of an investigating committee, Lodge presided over partisan
hearings designed to paper over the brutality of the war in the Philippines.
The Mugwump Boston Herald charged that “our troops in the Philippines
. . . look upon all Filipinos as of one race and condition, and being dark men,
they are often therefore ‘niggers,’ and entitled to all the contempt and harsh
treatment administered by white overlords to the most inferior races.” The
roles of Lodge and the Mugwump critics of 1890 were now reversed. 67

This confluence of attitudes matched that of Lodge’s friend, Theodore
Roosevelt, who greatly disillusioned his African-American supporters. A few
days after the November 1906 elections, Roosevelt dismissed without trial
three regiments of African-American troops who had refused to cooperate
with an investigation into an alleged shooting incident at Brownsville, Texas,
during August. Nationally, the African-American community protested Roo¬
sevelt’s decision. In Massachusetts, a delegation of African-American veter¬
ans, including Civil War hero Sergeant William Carney of New Bedford,
visited Governor Curtis Guild Jr. They urged him to intercede with Roose¬
velt, but the president stood by his decision. When other senators began
their own investigation, Lodge suggested that Secret Service men block their
inquiries, and gratuitously attacked the record of the black soldiers prior to
the Brownsville affair. 68

George Frisbie Hoar never abandoned his long-range civil rights goals, but
these were relegated to a far-off future as he turned his attention to other
issues. He no longer thought that much could be accomplished by legislation
on behalf of African-Americans. Early in 1895, a despairing African-Ameri¬
can editor in Cincinnati wrote to him, wondering if it were not perhaps best
that the colored people allow themselves to be deported to Africa, as an
Alabama senator was demanding. Hoar suggested that his correspondent
look on the bright side. Southern whites would not seek the deportation
of the people upon whose labor the region depended. Beyond that, colored
Americans were better off than most non-Americans, and by practicing the

The Federal Elections Bill of 1890 53

Puritan virtues their condition would improve still more. “The Negro ques¬
tion is to be settled in this country by the personal worth of the Negro,” he
concluded. 69

Governor Russell, like most Massachusetts Democrats, said and did little
about national race relations after 1890. His concern was to unite a Demo¬
cratic Party that was splintering over the currency question. After serving
three one-year terms as governor, he returned to his private practice. In 1896,
he sought the presidency as the true heir of Grover Cleveland, only to be
overwhelmed by William Jennings Bryan, whose “cross of gold” speech at the
convention followed Russell’s. Russell died a few weeks later, like Henry
Grady, just short of celebrating his fortieth birthday. 70

If Russell did not disappoint African-Americans because he never cared
about them anyway, Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s career symbolized the
retreat of Brahmin radicals who dedicated their early lives to abolition. He
wrote and lectured on literature, becoming a highly regarded member of re-
pectable society, but the rights of African-Americans ceased to be a preoccu¬
pation. Still, just before his death in 1911 at the venerable age of eighty-eight,
he sought out membership in the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People. 71

The failure of the Lodge bill led to strained relations between African-
American and white Republicans. Both the Equal Rights Association and
the Colored National League demanded that the Republicans nominate a
black man on their state ticket in 1891. They proposed William H. Dupree,
chairman of the former group, as candidate for state auditor, and vowed to
run him as an Independent if the Republicans refused. Dupree later changed
his mind, and the black politicians then switched to William O. Armstrong.
With or without African-American prompting, the Prohibition Party de¬
cided to nominate Armstrong as its candidate. Then Dupree appeared at the
Republican convention, seeking its nomination, which suggests that he
wanted the office but not a confrontation with the party. The Republicans
brushed him off, and convention chairman Henry Cabot Lodge “delivered
an address that the democratic dailies were unable to pick a flaw in,” the New
York Age observed. Not even Timothy Thomas Fortune knew what to do
about this dilemma. “The Massachusetts Afro-Americans are an unusually
intelligent, independent, and courageous people,” he averred, but could offer
no advice from afar. The Bostonians went ahead and built a meeting for
Armstrong. Some speakers assailed the Republicans, one praised the state
Democrats, and Armstrong of course lauded the Prohibitionists. In Novem¬
ber he ran ahead of his ticket, but all received few votes in the Democratic

54 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

victory. The unity behind the Republicans was temporarily shattered, and the
argument in favor of political independence gained ground . 72

In the years after 1890, the Boston Evening Transcript continued as the
voice of respectably upper-class Boston. The paper remained under the edi¬
torship of Edward Henry Clement until 1905, when he was removed in favor
of a man more responsive to the ownership’s conservative views. From 1901
to 1920 he authored “The Listener” column, advancing his mildly reformist
views on women’s suffrage, temperance, and pacifism. On racial questions he
remained unchanged: a believer in and advocate of Negro progress, a defender
of African-Americans against racial violence, a gradualist on civil rights. 73

The Boston Globe paid much less attention to racial matters. The African-
American appeared in the Globe from 1890 to 1920 mostly as a troublemaker
and participant in violent affrays. While the Globe opposed lynching, as did
virtually all northern newspapers, it showed little interest in civil rights. After
the turn of the century, the paper ran a cartoon, “Mr. Asa Spades,” that
mirrored the white culture’s image of the African-American as a harmless
buffoon. Neither the Globe s news coverage nor its rare editorial comment did
much to counter this image. 74

The years after the defeat of the Federal Elections bill were marked by a
prolonged retreat by Boston’s white Brahmins on the question of black politi¬
cal and civil rights. African-American Bostonians never abandoned the fight,
but political action seemed less efficacious after 1890. In the aftermath of the
failure of politics, a strategy of self-help and economic advancement became
more compelling as a strategy of race advancement. What this meant in a city
that already granted political and civil rights will be explored in the following
chapter.

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Good Food and Prompt, Attentive Service have made this a most
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894 Tremont Street - - Boston,

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TWO

Booker T. Washington
and Boston’s Black Upper Class

Booker T. Washington was the most powerful African-American leader
of his time; he may have exercised more influence over the ideas of black
Americans at the height of his power, between 1895 and 1906, than any other
leader in history, with the exceptions of Frederick Douglass or Martin Luther
King Jr. One of the many paradoxes of his life was that he denied any interest
in politics and disdained ideology, yet acted upon the political and intellectual
world of both races with great force. In part, his stated lack of concern with
power and ideas was disingenuous; in part he simply absorbed the pragmatic,
commercial spirit of his age, and translated it into a bargain between the races
with an unconsciousness that gave his program all the more appeal.

In Washington’s mind, that program was fashioned to meet the needs of
the mass of African-Americans, from whom he himself had come. These
rural black southerners, freedpeople or their descendants, working as share¬
croppers, laborers, farmers, or artisans, were overwhelmed in the period
1890-1920 by white reaction. The relation of forces between African-Ameri¬
cans, increasingly abandoned by northern supporters, and the leaders of the
white South, allowed the whites to dictate the terms of the 1895 Atlanta
Compromise. Washington’s famous 1895 speech registered his appraisal of
current political reality, not his long-term vision. However, what might seem
a realistic, if minimal, program in the South looked like capitulation to some
northern African-Americans. Since the opposition to accommodation came
primarily from Massachusetts men such as William Monroe Trotter or Wil¬
liam Edward Burghardt Du Bois (then teaching at Atlanta University), the
question arises, How did black Bostonians who defended Washington do so?

That question may best be approached through the interpretation of
Washington’s life offered by his biographer, Louis R. Harlan; the work of

58 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

Harlan and Raymond L. Smock in the published Booker T. Washington
papers; and the perspective of August Meier in Negro Thought in America y
1880-1915. 1 These historians argue that Washington was not simply an ac-
commodationist, although he fought a secret and dirty war against his north¬
ern opponents who denounced him as such. His “secret life” held a second
dimension: behind the scenes he organized legal battles against Jim Crow
laws and disfranchisement. 2 Even his public rhetoric was fraught with ambi¬
guity. As Harlan reminds us, he never defined the phrase in the Atlanta
Compromise speech: “those things of a social nature in which the races might
remain separate.” 3 Further, it must be remembered that Washington never
took the terms of the Atlanta Compromise as permanent. His many northern
supporters, African-American and white, could focus on the image of Wash¬
ington the builder. At the heart of their vision was not the enduring subordi¬
nation of African-Americans, but the gradual rise of a people toward full
equality through industry, education, and patriotism. By trying to silence all
opposition within the African-American community, however, he guaran¬
teed a polarization into two broad camps, each of which shared some of the
other’s values. The heated atmosphere discouraged thoughtful dialogue and
encouraged a war of rhetoric.

This chapter explores Washington’s relation with Boston’s black commu¬
nity, and more especially with its upper class. Booker Washington tried to
control the national African-American community, and he did that by acting
upon the leadership layer: arranging patronage and power for friends, pushing
enemies to the margin. Boston was a hotbed of opposition toward him, but
it is also true that for a while it was an important base of support for him. In
the beginning of his career as a school principal, especially before the 1895
speech that made him famous, white Bostonians were among his most im¬
portant financial backers. But the 1903 confrontation with Monroe Trotter in
Boston showed that he was still the authoritative figure in the black commu¬
nity as well. Only the subsequent deterioration of national race relations dur¬
ing the second Theodore Roosevelt administration lent sufficient force to
the militant perspective to establish Trotter’s leadership in Boston’s African-
American community.

If Washington’s support was broader than Trotter’s in 1903, it was also
thinner. Black Bostonians who liked Washington’s message generally did not
agree with his public posture of downplaying civil and political rights. They
endorsed the work of the Tuskegee Institute, but they did not necessarily
agree that African-Americans should shun higher education. Upper-class
black Bostonians approved of Washington’s respectful attitude toward cul¬
tured whites, and his adoption of their values. Like him, they sent their

Booker T. Washington 59

children to predominantly white schools, summered on the shore, and pre¬
ferred the symphony to ragtime. However, because they lived in abolitionist
Boston, they could not simply present national race relations in accommoda-
tionist terms. As they observed a worsening of race relations in Boston and
the country as a whole, their support for Booker Washington became more
defensive. More than other Americans, the spirit of their city compelled them
to consider what William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, or Wendell
Phillips might say if they were still alive.

Booker Washington himself had important roots in Boston. His intellec¬
tual heritage was of New England: Puritan, Yankee capitalist, and even aboli¬
tionist molded Washington’s thought. His first teachers were Viola Knapp
Ruffner of Vermont and General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the founder
of Hampton Institute and son of Massachusetts missionaries. As a builder of
Tuskegee Institute, he looked first to Boston and New England for financial
support, which came in large part from such neo-abolitionist families as those
of George Stearns and Brahmin businessman Henry Lee Higginson. His
wife, Olivia A. Davidson, attended the Massachusetts State Normal School
at Framingham through the efforts of Boston’s Mary Hemenway, and he
established a summer residence at South Weymouth, on the state’s South
Shore . 4 His ghostwriters, Max B. Thrasher and later Robert Park, were Bos¬
tonians. He probably chose Boston for the first convention of the National
Negro Business League because he knew Boston best of the northern cities.
He included an elegy to the city in Up From Slavery , and he was a stranger
neither to Beacon Street nor to Harvard Yard. If he was a product of the
South, he was also a product of the New England philanthropic intervention
into the South, just as the leaders of Boston’s black community were. In that
sense, Booker Washington was one of them . 5

Four interrelated factors prevented conservatives among Boston’s black
upper class from leading the community as a whole during the Age of Wash¬
ington. These problems were in part replicated nationally and were in part
more specific to Boston. They help explain why militants gained the upper
hand more forcefully in Boston than in other cities. First was a general di¬
lemma that Bookerites everywhere faced: ostensibly, their leader’s philosophy
was nonpolitical, and in the face of a political challenge they were disarmed.
Second, Boston’s black upper class stood particularly aloof from the rank
and file. Third, Boston’s African-American businessmen were economically
weaker than their counterparts in other cities. Finally, the white support for
Washington was morally authoritative in Boston; thus when it began to frac¬
ture, black Bostonians who supported Washington were cut adrift. Lacking a

6 o Boston Confronts Jim Crow

deeply rooted base in the community, not entirely agreeing with Washington
anyway, the conservative upper class was transformed.

The first problem Boston's Bookerites faced was common to his backers
everywhere. Washington counterposed his philosophy of self-help, deference,
and economic uplift to the open struggle for civil rights. Throughout the
1890s the two sides met in annual struggle at meetings of Timothy Thomas
Fortune's Afro-American Council, which Washington dominated. However,
this was not a mass organization that Washington strove to build, for he did
not believe in such things. He professed not to lead. Similarly, the National
Negro Business League was open only to the small number of businessmen
and professionals, and it refused to act on political developments. William
Monroe Trotter's various groups, later W. E. B. Du Bois's activist Niagara
movement, and finally the National Association for the Advancement of Col¬
ored People, were all projects open to the rank and file that solicited mem¬
bers. Ultimately, the Bookerites had nothing to counterpose to them.

As sociologist Adelaide Cromwell Hill observed, Boston's black upper
class was “an exclusive society into which one definitely did or did not be¬
long.” Historian Willard B. Gatewood agreed that “Boston's aristocrats of
color tended to be socially exclusive while also cultivating connections with
whites.” They valued lighter skin color, attended white churches, and joined
interracial boards of municipal institutions. While families with long resi¬
dence in Boston formed the core of this society, it was possible to learn or
earn one's way to acceptance. Southern migrants who were well educated or
wealthy also belonged to this class of proprietors and professionals. Promi¬
nent families of both sorts included the Ruffins, Ridleys, John Lewises,
Grants, Benjamins, Lews, Wilsons, Duprees, William Henry Lewises,
Sampsons, Trotters, and others . 6

Novelist Dorothy West in The Living Is Easy and memoirist Walter J.
Stevens in Chip On My Shoulder drew portraits of this society. Both books
depict the aloofness of the upper class and its economic weakness. The very
titles of their books suggest a world of comfort, pride, and self-confidence,
but it was also a world not far removed from vulnerability. Bart Judson, the
“black banana king” of West's novel, is based on the author's own prosperous
father, whose parsimoniousness was rooted in his impoverished past. Ste¬
vens's father owned a small restaurant, and the author moved in the black
upper class as a clerk in the mayor's office and afterward as a steward in a
Harvard club. Both stories show that people in the upper class knew that
their economic situation was insecure. The discussion of the National Negro
Business League in this chapter will develop this point . 7

A final conundrum for Boston’s black upper class involved its own relation

Booker T. Washington 61

to the white world. During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, upper-class
African-Americans modeled their culture in part on white society. In Boston,
because of the city’s unique antislavery tradition, this pattern was probably
more pronounced than in other cities. Booker Washington’s support among
such neo-abolitionists as William Lloyd Garrison Jr. and Francis Jackson
Garrison, sons of the abolitionist editor; or Thomas Wentworth Higginson
and Mary Stearns, who had conspired with John Brown, gave him a credibil¬
ity he would not have in cities where such people were not already written
into legend. Prominent Harvard academics such as Charles W. Eliot, presi¬
dent of the institution, the philosopher William James, geologist Nathaniel
Southgate Shaler, and literature professor Barrett Wendell were all Washing¬
ton supporters. But as white moderates lost interest in black progress, and
when the radicals founded the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People, Booker Washington’s white Boston base became signifi¬
cantly attenuated. Some of the ground was cut out from under upper-class
moderates.

The extent to which African-American Bostonians felt hesitant about
Washington’s perspective within and among themselves can be seen in a se¬
ries of public meetings held around the turn of the century, before the launch¬
ing of William Monroe Trotter’s Guardian hardened the groupings into
factions. A large interracial audience of prominent people came to hear
Washington speak on 21 March 1899 at the Hollis Street Theater. On the
platform also were Atlanta University professor W. E. B. Du Bois, and the
poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar. 8 The following year he launched the National
Negro Business League in Boston. In 1901, he addressed the Wendell Phillips
Club, Boston’s most exclusive African-American men’s club. All three meet¬
ings showed that Washington had great authority among black and white
elites. 9

But the hard ugliness of southern reality intruded into the picture of grad¬
ual economic uplift that Washington unfailingly painted. A few weeks after
Washington’s 1899 Boston speech, a huge mob brutally tortured Sam Hose
to death near Atlanta. Boston’s militants had already planned a meeting to
commemorate the anniversary of Charles Sumner’s election to the U.S. Sen¬
ate. Gathered at Young’s Hotel, they hissed President William McKinley
for failing to denounce southern outrages against black people, and they
hissed again at the mention of Tuskegee Institute. Booker Washington did
not comment publicly on the Sam Hose lynching, but his Boston supporters
joined with his opponents to do just that a few weeks after the Young’s Hotel
meeting. Black and white speakers including attorney William Henry Lewis,
Reverend Samuel M. Crothers, Archibald Grimke, Thomas Wentworth

62 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

Higginson, former state attorney general Albert E. Pillsbury, and former gov¬
ernor John Quincy Adams Brackett addressed a spirited audience at the Peo¬
ple's Temple in early May. This public meeting indicated that to be a Booker
Washington supporter in Boston did not preclude speaking out for civil
rights . 10

A study of four representative groupings shows the breadth of Washing¬
ton's following among Boston’s “aristocrats of color." While some remained
earnest Bookerites for many years, others changed their views with the times
when accommodation seemed not to work. The founders of the Colored
American Magazine endorsed Washington’s constructive efforts and ques¬
tioned militant tactics, but they also insisted upon full equality. In 1905,
Washington engineered the appearance of Alexanders Magazine , which oscil¬
lated between accommodation and militance. The National Negro Business
League, launched in Boston in 1900, tried to build up a black commercial
class. Finally, white Bostonians, liberal and radical, contributed to Tuskegee
and at least for a while, to gradualism.

THE COLORED AMERICAN MAGAZINE

The Colored American Magazine , published by the Colored Co-operative
Publishing Company, first appeared in May 1900, vowing its devotion “to
the higher culture of Religion, Literature, Science, Music and Art of the
Negro, Universally." The professional quality of its prose, photography, lay¬
out, and printing suggested that it had gathered sound financial backing and
had hope of securing more. Headquartered at 232 West Canton Street in the
South End, the magazine proudly declared, after a year of publication, that
its production values showed it to be the first fully up-to-date magazine in
the history of the race. It lasted four years in Boston until financial difficulty
forced its transfer to New York and indirect control by Booker Washington. 11

The Colored American was the project of four Virginia migrants and one
Bostonian whose stories typified the values of hard work, perseverance, and
thrift. The Virginians were all young men in their late twenties who arrived
in Boston a few years before launching the magazine. Walter W. Wallace,
the managing editor, was the descendant of Hampton graduates; he worked
in Boston as a prescription clerk in a drugstore. Jesse W. Watkins had been
a miner and electrician but by 1901 he owned real estate in Virginia and was
a prominent Boston lodge member. The treasurer, Harper S. Fortune, was a
musician and legal clerk, and the advertising manager, Walter Alexander
Johnson, worked by day for a publishing company. These unknown and

Booker T. Washington 63

largely uneducated young men turned out a remarkably sophisticated publica¬
tion with a national circulation. 12

The real workhorse of the magazine, who become the editor in 1903, was
Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. She was the oldest of the group, born in 1859,
the only Bostonian, and the only woman (the magazine did have other female
contributors, but none so prolific as Hopkins). Born in Portland, Maine, to a
Virginia-born father and a mother descended from Boston church leaders
Nathaniel and Thomas Paul, Hopkins’s parents moved to Boston where she
graduated from high school. As a student she read books by African-Ameri¬
can novelist William Wells Brown and wrote a prize-winning essay on tem¬
perance. After graduation she worked as a stenographer and performed with
her family in theatrical productions. In the late 1890s she worked on a novel,
Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South. The
Colored American printed it separately, and serialized three subsequent novels.
She published seven short stories and numerous biographical articles in a
series on famous African-Americans. After the magazine moved to New York
she virtually ceased writing, returned to stenography, and died in 1930 in a
fire. There were no obituaries. She had been the central contributor to one
of the country’s leading African-American literary magazines, and she died
in obscurity, not to be noticed again until the 1970s, when feminist literary
critics rediscovered her work. 13

Hopkins toiled in the unsubtle genre of magazine fiction and hewed close
to the conventions of literary melodrama. As her plots twisted and turned,
heroines clung to their virtue, heroes displayed their courage, and villains
seduced and abandoned their prey. At the end of many exciting adventures,
virtue was inevitably rewarded and vice exposed and condemned. Her work
was unabashedly sentimental and her moral values steadfastly Victorian; she
offered a simple presentation of good and evil, unalloyed. Hopkins was, how¬
ever, a race-proud feminist, and as such she was twenty years ahead of the
better known writers of the Harlem Renaissance . 14

Despite Hopkins’s literary flair, the financial weakness of the community
and the reluctance of white creditors to lend money made the project a risky
business. Editor Wallace after little more than a year was forced to appeal to
Booker T. Washington for financial support. Washington bought some stock
and later Boston’s William H. Dupree came to the rescue as financial angel
and publisher, but he could not keep the magazine afloat. When the money
ran out, Washington moved the magazine to New York and the close editorial
supervision of his ally Fred R. Moore. During its Boston incarnation, the
editors looked toward Washington as the leading black American and always
wrote favorably of him, but he never tried to dictate its policy . 15

64 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

The general tenor of the magazine was one of high-minded self-improve¬
ment, and the editors displayed their erudition as proof that African-Ameri¬
cans could assimilate into respectable white society. They focused on
achievement in the arts and sciences, intending to reach the upper-class audi¬
ence. The January 1901 edition, for example, featured articles on Virginia
University; Elijah Lovejoy, the abolitionist martyr; “Boston’s Smart Set,”
which spotlighted African-American society women; and a regular feature,
“Fascinating Bible Stories.” Another regular series described the bravery of
colored troops in the Philippines. Washington himself was lionized on occa¬
sion, but sparingly. Augustus M. Hodges wrote one such piece, finding “The
Solution to the Negro Problem” in Washington’s formulas. 16

The first editorial marked the political course the magazine vowed to fol¬
low. Wallace denounced the white South for its racist policies, the Supreme
Court for its retreat on the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and the
New England pulpit for its silence. While determined to speak out for justice,
Wallace defended Booker Washington against complaints “that he caters too
much to the opposite race at the expense of his own.” This was an unwar¬
ranted charge against a “benefactor” who “does not deserve censure, criticism
and calumny.” 17 The Colored American thus shielded Washington from his
critics, but also condemned lynching, segregation, and disfranchisement.

Washington’s politics were at their weakest in his handling of racist vio¬
lence. He tended to discuss lynching in general terms, stressing its debasing
effect upon the perpetrators and the white population. He sometimes said
nothing about particular outrages, or complained privately to the appropriate
official. Typical of his behavior in this period was his tepid response to the
Sam Hose lynching, upon which he refused to comment. Instead he wrote a
letter of protest to the governor of Georgia, which his friend Timothy
Thomas Fortune convinced him to suppress. Washington then left the coun¬
try on vacation, and from London addressed a weak letter of concern to the
southern newspapers, in which he appealed evenhandedly to whites to cease
the practice and to blacks to behave in a more law-abiding spirit. 18

By contrast, the Colored American regarded lynching as a crime against
colored people whose responsibility rested with the perpetrators, not the vic¬
tims. It appealed to the sentiment in favor of due process of law. On rare
occasions, it published contributions supporting the right of African-Ameri¬
cans to defend themselves against such mobs. While it did not publicize the
campaign of Ida B. Wells to make lynching a federal crime, probably for fear
of going beyond Republican policy, the editors typically expressed outrage
and called for urgent measures.

While Booker Washington stressed the relationship between criminality

Booker T. Washington 65

and lynching, the Boston editors blamed race hatred. One such article, by
Reverend Quincy Ewing of Greenville, Mississippi, compared mob action to
anti-Semitic pogroms of the Dark Ages. He called on Mississippians to
stamp out lynching by denying state funds to counties that failed to suppress
the practice, and to remove sheriffs who would not prosecute lynchers. When
President William McKinley was assassinated in Buffalo, New York, an Afri¬
can-American fairgoer wrestled the gunman to the ground. The editors
printed his story, and equated lynching with anarchism. After a 1903 lynching
at Wilmington, Delaware, the Colored American editorialized against a “com¬
munity corrupted in civic ideals and void of civic and moral virility.” The
editors contrasted the official repression of pogromists in czarist Russia with
the official tolerance of lynchers in the United States by reprinting an anti¬
lynching Boston Herald article. Booker Washington’s supporters in Boston
reflected the disgust for the summary executions shown in the North. 19

Washington’s approach to the suffrage problem was more complex than
his general silence regarding lynching. His public posture was to accept the
new disfranchisement legislation passed by state legislatures or special con¬
ventions, but to insist that property or education requirements be applied
fairly to both races. Privately, however, Washington arranged legal challenges
to disfranchisement in Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia. Some Bostonians,
such as the attorney Richard P. Hallowell, who worked on these appeals,
knew his role. 20

The Colored American editors did not accept Washington’s public views on
disfranchisement. They published articles by Hallowell and Moorfield Storey
that took up the wider intellectual assault on the Fifteenth Amendment. The
Boston Herald , Secretary of State Elihu Root, Outlook editor Lyman Abbott,
the Charleston (South Carolina) Evening Post and the New York Sun, all de¬
clared Negro suffrage a failure. Hallowell defended radical Reconstruction
policies, arguing that “in the South, white suffrage is comparatively a failure”
since it was used “as a potent weapon in their effort to degrade the Negro to
the social condition of social servitude.” He defended the Reconstruction
regimes from the charge of corruption and contrasted them to the record of
the Redeemers with scholarly thoroughness and an impassioned tone. In
South Carolina, “no white man today, as I know from personal experience,
can . . . treat the colored man as an ordinary citizen of the United States
without making himself liable to insult and cowardly assault.” Moorfield Sto¬
rey insisted upon the duty of the emancipators to follow through on the work
they had begun. “The same reason that led us to abolish slavery forbade us
to establish any legal inequality between man and man.” 21

The magazine was also a step ahead of Washington in its evaluation of the

66 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

May 1900 Montgomery Race Conference, organized by the Reverend Edgar
Gardner Murphy, a Montgomery Progressive. Washington hoped that the
conference might facilitate interracial dialogue, and he worked for its success
even after blacks were relegated to a Jim Crow section as voiceless observers.
The Tuskegee campus newpaper described the conference in neutral tones,
although the meetings effect was to encourage disfranchisement.

The Boston editors published a less sanguine appraisal. M. F. Hunter
found that “the Negro has come out of the crucible of analysis and decision
with less than justice done to him.” He concluded that “the conference
showed the bitterness of the white man of the South,” and he placed the
blame for the breakdown in race relations on the whites. A subsequent issue
rebutted a speech that Washington had endorsed. 22

In the wake of the July 1903 Boston “Riot,” in which William Monroe
Trotter disrupted a Washington speech, the Colored American maintained a
discreet and lengthy silence. It did not respond until November, when it
reprinted a pseudonymous piece by Kelly Miller, of Howard University, who
occupied a middle ground between the contending camps. Dismissing the
confrontation as “regrettable,” Miller coolly compared and contrasted the
relative strengths and weaknesses of Washington with those of Trotter and
W. E. B. Du Bois, whose Souls of Black Folk appeared just before the affray.
In the October issue, the editors had warmly greeted Du Bois’s book as a
“powerful blow at lynching advocates, Jim Crow cars, and peonage” but pru¬
dently kept silent on its critical evaluation of Washington. A two-part series
in December 1903 and January 1904 rebuked the disruptors. A. Kirland Soga,
a South African correspondent, argued that Harvard-educated Boston Ne¬
groes, who enjoyed the liberties of their city, a “beacon light of civilization,”
should not turn their fire on a beleaguered representative of southern Negro
education. Trotters questions to Washington seemed merely cheap polemical
tricks. Soga argued that “the honor of the race leaders, and of the race itself
makes it imperative that they should be protected against the brutality of
black mobocrats, and the prestige of the race is degraded not enhanced by
such sights as Booker Washington being escorted under police protection to
his carriage to escape from violence.” Every out-group fears making a spec¬
tacle of itself, and the Colored American , seeking to present a positive image
of the race, was embarrassed by Trotters creating such an ugly scene. 23

The editors were caught in the dilemma of being genteel Bostonians. On
the one hand, they valued Washington’s good work, financial backing, and
powerful influence. On the other hand, they wanted an end to Jim Crow,
lynching, and disfranchisement and said so openly. Yet Trotter’s rude solution
to this dilemma—rallying the plebeian elements against the respectable—also

Booker T. Washington 67

seemed wrong, but the editors could not forthrightly declare this. Kelly Miller
in distant Washington, D.C., and A. Kirland Soga in faraway South Africa
had to speak for them. Their muteness symbolized the contradictions of an
upper class beginning to lose its influence.

ALEXANDER *S MAGAZINE

The Colored American Magazine was an independent journal that looked to
Booker Washington for guidance and some financial aid. During its brief
Boston incarnation it stayed within the Tuskegee orbit while retaining its
critical independence. Alexanders Magazine , by contrast, was a Washington
operation from the beginning. One Washington tactic was to put Trotter out
of business by organizing a rival Boston newspaper. After two such short¬
lived attempts—the Advocate and the Enterprise —failed, he tried a third, the
Boston Colored Citizen , under the direction of Peter J. Smith and J. Will Cole.
Smith consistently pestered Washington for money, and the disgruntled edu¬
cator imported Tuskegee graduate and former Boston resident Charles Alex¬
ander to take over the reins. When this paper failed within a year, Alexander
launched a monthly in 1905 .Alexander s Magazine. What began as a conscious
effort to build a pro-Washington literary mouthpiece in Boston ended in
Alexander’s offering the magazine to the NAACP in 1909. A combination
of the Boston political-intellectual environment and national developments,
especially the Brownsville incident and the Atlanta Riot of 1906, curtailed
the possibility of establishing an accommodationist journal in the city. 24

The Colored American Magazine was published during the height of Wash¬
ington’s power, which was linked in great measure to President Theodore
Roosevelt’s patronage. The life of Alexander s Magazine was roughly contem¬
poraneous with the president’s retreat on African-American rights during his
second term, which made its task more difficult. Alexander’s earlier career
suggested he was himself stamped out of the Tuskegee Machine. He was
teaching printing at Wilberforce when Washington brought him to Boston.
Despite Alexander’s personal limitations, he produced a lively if uneven jour¬
nal that reflected the tension between Tuskegee financing and a sober view
of worsening race relations from liberal Boston. Alexander grew as a writer
and polemicist. His contributors included Reverdy C. Ransom, a lifelong
Washington opponent; Archibald Grimke, the distinguished writer and for¬
mer diplomat, who edited the magazine in the fall of 1907; and Walter F.
Walker, corresponding from Liberia. White writers appeared more regularly
in Alexanders than in the Colored American Magazine. These included the old
abolitionist Frank Sanborn; settlement-house worker John Daniels, who

68 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

wrote the book reviews; and occasional reprints from Edward H. Clement, a
moderate editor of the Boston Evening Transcript. This would be an impres¬
sive roster for any magazine. 25

At its most dull, Alexander s ran tedious celebrations of Tuskegee and other
African-American institutions, laden with Washingtonian cliches. The first
issue, for example, contained a reprint from the Baptist Missionary Magazine ,
relating the work of the Hampton Institute in Africa. Subsequent issues usu¬
ally included similar features on black colleges in a public relations vein. Alex¬
ander devoted a considerable amount of space to the pomp surrounding
Washington’s installation as a Mason in Boston. If such articles were predict¬
able, they were nevertheless assertions of determination to build enduring
institutions rooted in the community: church, school, and lodge. 26

Alexanders Magazine regarded Trotter and Du Bois as opponents, but
never fairly engaged them or their ideas in open intellectual combat. Trotter
was an offstage nuisance, a sectarian to be occasionally denounced but never
named. In an otherwise innocuous piece on “Negro Journalism” the editor
disparaged those who “engaged in this sacred calling who openly pervert its
functions. They form the growling, grumbling, gossipping . . . pessimistic
element.” Another article called Trotter and his friends a “selfish, bigoted,
non-race loving class—men who know little about the Negro in or outside of
Boston . . . the solid [Negro] businessmen in Boston are with Booker T.
Washington, quietly doing constructive work.” Du Bois commanded more
respect. Alexander treated him as a fallen angel who had separated himself
from the radiance of Tuskegee. Reviewing The Souls of Black Folk , which had
been out for two and a half years, John Daniels urged prospective readers to
take it “not as an argument, as an anti-Washington protest, but as a poem, a
spiritual, not intellectual offering, an appeal not to the head but to the heart.”
When the Niagara movement’s journal The Moon appeared, Alexander called
it “abominable,” despite Du Bois’s literary skill. In a tone of snide condescen¬
sion Alexanders condemned the second meeting of the Niagara movement
as a gathering of speechifiers intent on destroying Booker T. Washington.
Ironically, the magazine singled out as the worst offender the same Reverdy
C. Ransom who contributed to Alexanders both before and after the meeting.
It then reprinted, without comment, part of the Niagara movement’s plat¬
form. Throughout, Alexander treated Du Bois with ambivalent disdain and
respect, but never fairly appraised his ideas. 27

Alexanders covered the local political scene with a mixture of pragmatic
opportunism and scarcely concealed disgust. By 1905, African-Americans had
been driven out of the state’s elective offices and the only practical political
activity left was to determine which candidates promised to appoint more

Booker T. Washington 69

black office-seekers. Alexanders hewed to the Republican candidate of the
moment, tending toward bland approval of both sides in contested primaries.
It hailed governors Eugene Foss, Curtis Guild, and Eben S. Draper as patri¬
ots. Trying to hold the victors to account, Alexanders called upon Senators
Henry Cabot Lodge and Winthrop Murray Crane to break personal relations
with South Carolina’s Ben Tillman. 28

All of this easily fit into the framework of any northern pro-Washington
journal. The Atlanta race riot, Theodore Roosevelt’s wholesale dismissal of
African-American troops at Brownsville, and the rhetorical retreat of Presi¬
dents Roosevelt and William Howard Taft on civil rights led to a furious
storm of condemnation by Alexanders that went completely beyond the
bounds of Washington’s terms. In the end, however, Alexander was bribed,
and wound up lamely supporting Taft. In a fit of frustration with the presi¬
dent it had just endorsed, the magazine folded a few months after his inaugu¬
ration, and as the NAACP was born. 29

The journal vented its ire at the entire government in 1906. “We have
heard nothing from President Roosevelt recently concerning the ‘square deal’
for the Negro citizen of the U.S.,” the editor complained. “When we realize
that there is not a single man in the House of Representatives at Washington
or in the Senate who has the courage to say a single word in defense of the
Negro at the present time, and there is not a Negro there to speak for himself
. . . the situation is pathetic to say the least.” 30 An all-white Congress was not
yet something to be grimly taken for granted.

The Atlanta race riot broke out a few months later, beginning 22 Septem¬
ber. After five days of violence against African-Americans, ten were killed,
many injured, and much property destroyed. In the aftermath, city leaders
formed an interracial committee to promote peaceful cooperation between
the races. However, they made no attempt to prosecute the perpetrators of
the violence. Jim Crow remained the law, and black Georgians lost their vote
after the 1906 gubernatorial election. 31

Alexander grew steadily more distraught. In October, the journal noted
the gains Atlanta Negroes had made since emancipation, condemned the
violence, and found a hopeful note in the formation of the interracial com¬
mittee. But the next month, the judicial aftermath had begun, and Alexander
wrote, “the grand jury indicts sixty Negroes for murder, and sixteen white
men for riot! If that is white Atlanta’s official expression on the subject, then
it is useless for anyone to pretend that Atlanta has any sense of justice.”
However, the magazine’s patron was doing exactly that. Taking care in the
next issue to applaud Washington’s speech at the Afro-American Council in
which the Tuskegean urged black people not to hate all whites, Alexander

jo Boston Confronts Jim Crow

unstintingly praised Du Bois and his Atlanta postmortem, which called for
prosecution of the perpetrators; condemnation of the politicians who created
the environment that facilitated the riot; restoration of the vote; and reduced
representation for Georgia in Congress if the vote were not granted. 32

Next came the ugly climax to an earlier incident. On the night of 13 Au¬
gust, unknown persons shot up a section of Brownsville, Texas, killing one
man and wounding another. For months previous, the city had treated Afri¬
can-American troops in the garrison there with hostility. The authorities
accused the soldiers, but some journalists of that time and recent scholars
argue that the men were framed. After the men refused to incriminate each
other, President Roosevelt consulted Booker Washington at a 30 October
White House meeting. Washington advised against harsh action and tried to
influence an upcoming presidential speech on lynching prompted by Atlanta.
Roosevelt waited until after the November elections, and then discharged
all the soldiers without honor. Then came Roosevelt’s December speech on
lynching. “The greatest cause of lynching is the perpetration, especially by
black men, of the hideous crime of rape,” the president declared. The best
prevention of this crime was a Tuskegee-type education. The principal of
Tuskegee did not demur on any of this. For some of Washington’s supporters,
including Timothy Thomas Fortune, editor of the New York Age , this was
too much. 33

A similar split developed more slowly in Boston, although Alexander was
not so important to the Tuskegee Machine as Fortune. In January 1907, Alex¬
ander ran “The True Story of the Brownsville Affair,” a reprint of a Boston
Herald article whose investigative journalist found that “the integral error . . .
of the whole unhappy incident lies in the military assumption that the un¬
sworn testimony, the gossip and hearsay of Brownsville is to be accepted as
conclusive evidence of the guilt of the Negroes.” In May, Archibald Grimke,
writing in Alexander s, denounced Roosevelt’s action as “Draconian,” and “a
blow dealt to the whole race,” in an article praising the congressional investi¬
gation begun by Ohio Senator Joseph B. Foraker. 34

The Atlanta riot and the Brownsville incident caused Alexander to call for
an end to the factional struggle on both sides. In a perceptive editorial, he
summarized the various strengths of the National Negro Business League,
the Afro-American Council, and the Niagara movement, concluding, “there
is evident good in all these modus operandi, but neither one unaided will
reach the desired goal. What is needed is a combination of the three, a pool
or a trust.” This call for unity was far from the mind of Washington, Trotter,
or Du Bois, and it went unheeded. 35

Washington did not want to lose Fortune or Alexander, but he labored

Booker T. Washington 71

especially hard to keep Archibald Grimke within the fold. By the autumn of
1907, when Grimke took over the editor’s job at Alexanders for three issues,
the two men had been in uneasy alliance for almost a decade. Grimke (1849—
1930) was the son of a master and his slave; during the Civil War he escaped
from Charleston to freedom, education, and his famous Boston aunts. Sarah
Grimke and Angelina Grimke Weld introduced Archibald into abolitionist
Boston society. Their nephew graduated from Harvard Law School, strolled
with Wendell Phillips, and edited the community newspaper, the Hub , dur¬
ing the mid-i88os. When white Republicans failed to support the newspaper
financially, Grimke gravitated toward the independent group, among whom
he had friends. His Democratic leanings earned him an appointment as con¬
sul to Santo Domingo in the second Grover Cleveland administration. In
1898 he returned to the United States, dividing his time between Boston and
Washington, D.C., where his influential brother Francis was a prominent
minister and Booker Washington supporter. 36

During the next decade Grimke established himself as a significant na¬
tional African-American leader through his writing and lecturing. Grimke’s
biographer, Dickson D. Bruce Jr., persuasively suggests that Grimke viewed
Washington as a cunning dissimulator who showed whites a deferential mask
while laboring for full equality. In this framework, Grimke may have rea¬
soned, it made sense for Bostonians like himself to speak out, but for recipi¬
ents of philanthropy in the South—like Washington—to hide their full
agenda. Grimke was then writing a paper on the antebellum free black insur¬
rectionist Denmark Vesey, Bruce argues, and Grimke may have seen Wash¬
ington as a careful dissembler, as Vesey was. 37

Trotter’s 1903 attack on the educator disturbed this alliance. Grimke at¬
tended the Boston “riot” meeting but did not disrupt it. Nontheless, Wash¬
ington suspected that Grimke and others stood behind Trotter, and he
attacked Grimke publicly. Grimke in turn testified on Trotter’s behalf at the
latter’s trial, but he never felt comfortable with the prickly Trotter. Washing¬
ton and Grimke reconciled at a leadership meeting in New York’s Carnegie
Hall in January 1904. He then became a writer for the New York Age , which
was firmly in Washington’s camp. 38

This alliance lasted for two and a half years, and was ultimately terminated
by the Brownsville incident. Grimke’s heated columns on the subject dis¬
tanced him from Washington. He joined the Niagara movement, causing a
split between Trotter, who felt betrayed by Grimke, and Clement Morgan,
who valued his participation. As the Boston branch of the Niagara movement
wallowed in internal disarray, Grimke took over the editorship of Alexanders
Magazine in the fall of 1907. He had never definitively broken with Washing-

72 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

ton, and he still approved of the Tuskegee mission. Alexander, too, was dis¬
gusted by Brownsville and the views of the two men were near enough to
permit collaboration. 39

In his first turn as editor Grimke complained that Secretary of War Taft
and the “autocratic occupant of the White House” had mishandled the
Brownsville incident and subsequent investigation by Senator Joseph B. Fora-
ker. He challenged Taft's “astounding assertion about the Southern white
man's being the ‘Negro’s best friend’ ” and reminded the Republicans that
these same “friends” were taking away the Negro's vote. Citing administra¬
tion failure to challenge discriminatory rulings in railroad cases, he concluded
angrily that the president “has quietly acquiesced in the nullification of the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution.” In the same
issue he reported positively on the Niagara movement, which called for a
Democratic vote in the North. As a case in point he offered Republican
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who, Grimke alleged, no longer cared about
the wrongs done to colored citizens. In November 1907, Grimke endorsed
Democratic mayoral candidate John F. Fitzgerald. That same month he left
Alexanders , which soon reverted to Republican regularity. This marked
Grimke's last dalliance in the Tuskegee camp. 40

Atlanta and Brownsville cast long shadows over African-American politics
as the 1908 election approached and Roosevelt’s appointed successor, Secre¬
tary of War William Howard Taft, who executed the Brownsville dismissal,
loomed as Roosevelt’s heir apparent. Washington predictably backed Taft,
hoping to turn support for the Republican mainstream into patronage. Alex¬
ander sided with Senator Foraker through the convention, and then had to
be bought off before supporting Taft. Comically, the Republican Negro Bu¬
reau, now run by a white functionary, almost paid the wrong people at the
convention. The Taft machine did not even know which black Bostonians it
thought it owned. During the general election, Alexander could muster only
a lukewarm pro-Taft editorial.

After the election, the president-elect made a speech before the North
Carolina Society of New York in which he pledged to leave the South alone,
and rejected the Negro plank passed at the 1908 convention. Alexanders flirted
with independence again, protesting that “if this repudiation . . . does not
open the Negro’s eyes to the fact that he can no longer depend on the sympa¬
thy and traditions of any party” he was blind indeed. 41 Within a few months
of the election, Alexander stopped publishing. Like the Colored American,
Alexanders Magazine reflected the ambivalence of Boston’s black upper class,
but because it appeared later, its contradictions were more pronounced. After
Atlanta and Brownsville it was more difficult to continue repeating that thrift

Booker T. Washington 73

and honesty would bring their own rewards. Neither Alexander nor Grimke
could maintain that perspective and both headed, separately, toward the

NAACP.

THE NATIONAL NEGRO BUSINESS LEAGUE

If there was a quintessential Booker T. Washington organization, it was the
National Negro Business League (NNBL). Washington led its founding at
the 1900 Boston convention and remained its president until his death in
1915. Yet, as Louis R. Harlan and August Meier have pointed out, Washing¬
ton took the idea for the league from W. E. B. Du Bois, whose 1899 Atlanta
University conference, “The Negro in Business,” proposed to develop such a
group; the Afro-American Council later that year assigned Du Bois the task
of organizing it. Acting outside the framework of the Afro-American Coun¬
cil, Washington issued a convention call in June 1900, to the consternation
of his political opponents. Despite the squabble for organizational control,
Meier and Harlan suggest, lay a temporary ideological agreement. Both men
shared the idea that the race would rise in accordance with the entrepreneur¬
ial spirit of the age. 42

Having stolen a march on the competition, Washington was in a position
to put his own stamp on the new organization. Pressed by his rivals to explain
its purpose, Washington responded through a white journalist that there
would be a division of labor between the political Afro-American Council
and the commercial NNBL. A business league led by Du Bois or Ida B.
Wells, another critic of this venture, might be more emphatic about the need
for political struggle. While Du Bois agreed with the notion of a business
league in general, William Monroe Trotter did not. At a 16 August meeting
in a Boston church shortly before the NNBL founding convention, an evenly
divided audience discussed how to approach the new organization. Former
city councilman Isaac B. Allen supported the new group, and William C.
Lane of Cambridge urged participation in the NNBL, but with the goal
of politicizing it. Trotter, who had not yet launched his weekly newspaper,
condemned the upcoming convention and called instead for a new political
organization. Trotter at once saw the NNBL as a diversion, and a tool of
Washington in the intraracial struggle. 43

Herein lay the first of the NNBL’s contradictions. It was born as an eco¬
nomic organization, and clearly could have a useful role to play as such. On
the other hand, it developed in struggle against the radicals, and naturally
adopted a conservative agenda. Despite its supposedly apolitical nature, it
acted as a counterpole of attraction to radical efforts.

74 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

There was a second contradiction as well. Again and again Washington
would explain that economic productivity knew no color line. His speeches
at NNBL conventions were generally a string of cliches in the Horatio Alger
vein. At the same time, Washington understood that race prejudice would
keep the Negro businessman marginalized. NNBL conventions were charac¬
terized by a cheerful atmosphere of small-town boosterism and innocent
hope, the same kind of business optimism that supplanted the Jeffersonian
myth around the turn of the century for white Americans. In the age of Jim
Crow and lynching, an air of unconscious irony pervades the same rhetoric in
the mouths of African-American conventioneers. As a student of the NNBL
concludes, “the portrayal of Negro business as worthy of imagined respect
and social prominence equal to that of their white counterparts was mytho¬
logical and a venture into the rhetoric of unreality.” 44 There was a need for a
National Negro Business League. However, African-American business suc¬
cess also depended upon the winning of political and civil equality. A sym¬
bolic rendering of the mutual interdependence of political freedom and
economic progress was the notorious 1892 lynching of black proprietors in
Memphis. White competitors wanted their market, and this hostile takeover
launched local journalist Ida B. Wells on a lifelong antilynching campaign.

The leaders of Boston's African-American business elite personified both
of these conjoined dilemmas. Lacking a political organization, they could not
or would not lead politically. Frozen out of easy access to credit, capital, and
white customers, they were in general respectable but marginal businessmen
providing services to a poor community. That is, they could not even lead
economically. The notable success stories to be briefly discussed here are the
exceptions that prove the rule, as the following statistics suggest.

In 1914, sociologist John Daniels found 353 men, or 7.8 percent of black
men at work, and 136, or 5.9 percent of working black women, in the profes¬
sional and proprietor category of the 1900 census, the last figures available to
him. Of those 353 men, in descending numerical order, were 60 musicians or
actors, 50 retail merchants, and 47 livery-stable keepers. Of “manufacturers
and officials” there were seven, and “bankers,” one. Of the 136 women, 55 were
boarding- and lodging-house keepers and 33 were actresses or musicians. The
remainder of both sexes were scattered among artisan, professional, and small
business categories. By his own impression, Daniels saw little change over
the fourteen-year period. Thus Boston's African-American “middle class”
was small in percentage of total population, and employed at humble pur¬
suits, both in status and economic remuneration. 45

There were exceptions to this picture. John H. Lewis led the first conven¬
tion's workshop on “merchant tailoring.” Born in Heathsville, North Caro-

Booker T. Washington 75

lina, he began with a $100 operation in Concord, Massachusetts, and by 1896
had a $150,000 per year Boston business with a largely white clientele. He was
one of the richest African-Americans in the country and was the prototype of
the man Washington hoped would lead the race. Joseph Lee, a baker, in¬
vented a bread-crumber and bread-kneading machine that mechanized the
industry. Money earned from these devices enabled him to open restaurants
in Boston, Auburndale, and Squantum. The largest wig manufacturing shop
in New England, supplying theatrical companies and individuals, was owned
by Gilbert C. Harris, originally a Virginian. These three businessmen, along
with others such as Basil F. Hutchins, undertaker, or the owners of the Astor
Hotel, which catered largely to Pullman porters, are prominent examples of
financially successful black Bostonians of the period. Taken as a group, their
marginality in relation to Boston’s white capitalists need hardly be argued.
Actual leadership of the league fell to Dr. Samuel F. Courtney, chairman and
longtime friend of Washington’s; Peter J. Smith, editor of a pro-Washington
newspaper, and Louis F. Baldwin, a Cambridge city councillor and brother
of the more famous Cambridge school principal Maria Baldwin. These less
wealthy members represented the rank and file of the organization better. 46

The average member was typified by people like R. L. Ames, a grocer who
complained at the founding convention that “we are extremely handicapped
in Boston,” because of white competition in mixed neighborhoods like the
South End, where whites avoided black-owned stores. The small size of Bos¬
ton’s black population retarded the growth of a business class that could grow
in other cities whose new industrial jobs attracted black migrants. Boston’s
African-American merchants or artisans now had to compete with a bur¬
geoning immigrant population that displaced black workers from certain es¬
tablished businesses, such as barbering or catering. Modernization would
soon replace the livery stables owned by black proprietors as automobiles and
elevated trains drove the horse from urban streets. By 1915, the more success¬
ful Lewises and Lees had not visibly multiplied, in part because start-up
capital had to be bigger as cities and business enterprises grew. The more
representative officers and board members of the NNBL remained obscure
figures. 47

On a national level, the NNBL did expand organizationally from 1900 to
1915. Three hundred people attended the 1900 convention, and three thou¬
sand attended fifteen years later when the convention returned to Boston.
Several Boston newspapers noted the large number of automobiles owned by
the 1915 conventioneers. Boston Mayor Thomas N. Hart attended in 1900,
and Governor David I. Walsh did in 1915. There was even a dispute at the
latter convention about rebuking Mayor James Michael Curley for failing to

76 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

ban the movie The Birth of a Nation. However, Booker T. Washington died
a few months later, and the national organization faded. 48

The Boston chapter illustrated the weakness of the NNBL, whose national
contributions should not be dismissed. The business leaders who achieved
success did not wish to lead the community politically. Economically, shop¬
keepers or providers of marginal services could not compete with new immi¬
grants who were flocking to Boston. The NNBL could not call a middle class
into being in a period of increasing race discrimination. In Boston, the rising
commercial class did not rise far.

This social fact should inform a question raised by historian Louis Harlan.
He recalls the work of Richard Hofstadter, who argued that the Progressive
movement was fueled by a “status anxiety” on the part of the old white elite,
which was surpassed by the newly wealthy captains of industry. Is it possible
that the older black elite felt the same anxiety in relation to a new rising
middle class, and that similar anxiety fueled the feelings of people like Trotter
or Du Bois? 49 Probably not: the new black upper class was just too small,
and its position in relation to white capital too tenuous to seem genuinely
disconcerting to people like Trotter, or Butler Wilson, an NAACP founder.
While there may have been some validity to the “status anxiety” concept for
Boston African-American militants, it is more likely that their hostility to
Booker Washington and his followers was rooted in their disagreement with
his political strategy in an age of reaction.

WHITE WASHINGTONIANS

Influential white Bostonians were unanimous in their support for Washing¬
ton’s educational project. Some, like Harvard president Charles W. Eliot,
also subscribed to his accommodationist views. Others, like the neo-aboli¬
tionist sons of William Lloyd Garrison, enthusiastically backed Tuskegee In¬
stitute while calling for full civil rights themselves. As James McPherson
shows in The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP , the
major contribution of second-generation white activists to African-America
was the promotion of education. Faced with the reality of reaction, the next
generation had to emphasize the positive to keep up their own spirits. While
they urged Washington to be more bold in their private correspondence, they
were not blind to the evolving relation of forces on the race question. Like
Washington, they were builders. However, between the Brownsville, Texas,
incident of 1906 and the Springfield, Illinois, race riot of 1908, they grew
increasingly impatient, and finally launched what became the NAACP in
1909. 50

Booker T. Washington 77

Boston’s mainstream elite, however, applauded Washington without am¬
bivalence. They believed in a limited ballot in general, sanctioned southern
segregation, and deplored lynching. The year after the Atlanta address, Har¬
vard awarded Washington an honorary degree. The following year he spoke
at the dedication of the Augustus Saint-Gaudens monument to the African-
American troops of the 54th and 55th Regiments. Before a huge gathering of
luminaries, Washington upstaged Governor Roger Wolcott, Mayor Josiah
Quincy, and other city fathers. From the podium he spoke directly to Ser¬
geant William Carney of New Bedford, who had carried the flag at the battle
of Fort Wagner. The crowd sprang to its feet with cheers, and the orator won
the heart of the city. 51

The personification of the Brahmin elite academic was Harvard president
Charles W. Eliot. During his long tenure at the helm of the university (1869-
1906) he modernized the curriculum, and opened the gates to a select few
African-Americans. This handful of students lived a marginal existence at
the school, but were treated fairly by the liberal faculty. Eliot saw African-
American progress in much the same terms as Washington did. When mod¬
erate black leaders honored Washington at a Cambridge banquet, Eliot
declared that his fellow college president “has done more than any other in
the world to open the way of equal education to his race.” Harvard faculty
members such as philosopher William James, historian Albert Bushnell Hart,
and geologist Nathaniel Southgate Shaler welcomed Washington to Boston
on several occasions. 52

If the enthusiasm of moderates like Eliot might be expected, that of the
neo-abolitionist Garrison family might at first seem surprising. However,
virtually the entire neo-abolitionist Boston milieu concurred with this feeling.
Some historians have taken this as proof of the weakness of the abolitionist
legacy. By 1901, William Monroe Trotter was attacking Washington, and in
1903, W. E. B. Du Bois joined in a softer tone. Yet, the Garrisons or other
families like the Hallowells continued to work with him for a few more years.
As McPherson argues, there is not much point in reading too much into this.
Support for Tuskegee did not equal endorsement of segregation by Boston’s
neo-abolitionists. 53

Like his father, William Lloyd Garrison Jr. (1838-1909) was a universal
reformer. He was interested in the rights of Chinese immigrants, economic
equality, and votes for women. As if to dramatize the difference between the
Gilded Age and the antebellum period, the eldest son was also a wool mer¬
chant and investment banker. These commercial values Garrison extolled at
the first convention of the National Negro Business League, at which he
likened Booker Washington to Benjamin Franklin. In 1908, Garrison gave a

78 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

civil rights speech that Monroe Trotter in his newspaper contrasted to Wash¬
ington’s rhetoric. Garrison wrote in reply that Washington was “the most
remarkable living American, black or white. . . . How easy for colored men
with academic advantages, secure in the stronghold of anti-slavery sentiment,
to affect disdain and engage in bitter speech.” 54

Francis Jackson Garrison (1848-1916) was a respectable editor at Houghton
Mifflin, comfortable owner of his home The Cedars, at Lexington, and emi¬
nence grise to his beloved nephew and protege, Oswald Garrison Villard of
New York, an editor at the New York Evening Post and the Nation. Garrison
arranged Washington’s trip to Europe in 1899 and corresponded occasionally
with him until 1908, but more so than any other white Bostonian, perhaps
more than any other white man. “I regard yours as the most valuable life in
America today,” Garrison wrote Washington in 1903, after the latter had
trounced Trotter at the Louisville Afro-American Council meeting. 55

Underlying the respect between the two men was a common belief in both
Puritan and Yankee values, and the meshing of Garrison’s pacifism and civil¬
ity with Washington’s public posture of humility. Added to this was Garri¬
son’s antipathy toward Trotter, which drove him closer to Washington.
Nevertheless, their correspondence reveals an underlying tension between
Garrison’s latent militancy and Washington’s accommodationism. Typically,
Garrison would warn Washington away from unprincipled Republicans such
as Theodore Roosevelt or paternalistic southern reformers like Edgar Gard¬
ner Murphy, and Washington would put the best construction upon some
compromise to which he felt constrained to agree.

Garrison freely offered Washington his thoughts on the maze of southern
politics. In the wake of the 1899 Sam Hose lynching, for example, Garrison
suspected that southern governors who opposed lynching but nontheless
countenanced disfranchisement would seek to use Washington to cover their
retreat on the latter issue. Garrison cautioned against appearing on the same
platform with such men as West Virginia Governor George W. Atkinson or
Georgia’s Allen D. Candler. He was soon impressed by Washington’s energy
and diplomacy in securing the defeat of Georgia’s disfranchising Hardwick
Amendment, which Washington optimistically trumpeted as a turning point
for the South. 56

Garrison next warned Washington away from the 1900 Montgomery Con¬
ference, the project of southern progressive and Episcopal clergyman Edgar
Gardner Murphy. Murphy hoped that this national conference would assert
the leadership of southern white moderates like himself. Garrison saw that
such “moderates” favored the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment as a means
to that end. In fact the conference degenerated into paternalistic race-baiting

Booker T. Washington 79

that, Harlan concludes, “set the stage for disfranchisement in Alabama.” Re¬
membering his fathers words, Garrison advised Washington that clergymen
were often beholden to wealthy congregations, and thus were incapable of
leading true reform movements. Placing the conference in its wider perspec¬
tive, Garrison saw that “the advocates of a ‘white man’s government’ are
evidently going to pour in and capture the conference. Our war with the
Filipinos has distinctly lowered the tone, and weakened the power and dispo¬
sition, of the Republicans to make a proper stand against such a movement.”
He warned too against President William McKinley’s willingness to repeal
the Fifteenth Amendment if he thought it would help his reelection cam¬
paign. Washington disregarded Garrison’s advice and sought to put the best
face upon an anti-civil rights gathering at which he was fulsomely praised. 57

Garrison willingly complied with Washington’s simultaneous secret chal¬
lenge to a Louisiana disfranchisement measure. Washington desired time and
money from Boston’s legal community, but he also wanted to keep his own
role out of the press. Although Garrison loyally provided names and enthusi¬
asm, attorneys Albert E. Pillsbury and Richard Price Hallowell participated
skeptically in an enterprise they suspected would fail without Washington’s
public imprimatur. For related reasons the suit failed to get off the ground. 58

A few years later, Garrison proved a faithful friend to Washington when
Du Bois and Trotter, then in alliance during the early days of the Niagara
movement, attempted to break Washington’s hold over the African-Ameri¬
can press through his secret support of special favorites. Though suspicious
of Washington’s maneuvers, Garrison stood by his trusted ally. In fact, the
crafty Washington deceived his sophisticated northern backers in this case.
Before launching the Niagara movement, Du Bois sent Oswald Garrison
Villard the sketchy evidence he could piece together of Washington’s finan¬
cial control of the press. Villard cautiously sent it on to his uncle for consider¬
ation. “I think the evidence is pretty clear that Washington] is subsidizing
the papers referred to,” Garrison concluded. “Where the money comes from,
I know not, but I should hope he would not regard it as a legitimate thing to
subtract any of the contributions to the Institute for that purpose.” After
speculating on Washington’s self-justification for such a course, Garrison
suggested that “it may be that the time has come when W’s best friends
should utter a word of caution.” 59

Yet a few days later, Garrison wrote to Villard, “It will take a great deal
more than what Du Bois has written or presented to shake my faith in Wash¬
ington’s purity of purpose and absolute freedom from selfishness and personal
ambition. . . . Nor have I seen the slightest trace of personal jealousy, bitter¬
ness or resentment in him towards those who have been so [unclear] toward

8 o Boston Confronts Jim Crow

him. ... I have never liked the bitterness betrayed by my friends the [Butler]
Wilsons . . . when BTW was mentioned.” 60

Writing to Washington, Garrison was more circumspect than he first
promised his nephew he would be. After complaining about the low quality
of Charles Alexander’s Colored Citizen , and Trotter’s “covert efforts to dis¬
credit you,” he asked for reassurance against the charge “that you have subsi¬
dized and bolstered up several papers, including the Citizen, have supplied
them, (through Mr. [Washington’s personal secretary Emmet J.] Scott) with
syndicate matter in laudation of yourself and Tuskegee, and that you are
constantly endeavoring by fair means or foul to stifle and crush out all opposi¬
tion to you and your policy.” Expressing his disdain for such notions, he
nevertheless urged Washington to “write me freely about this whole matter.
If I blow a blast I want to feel fortified at all points.” 61

Washington responded with obfuscation. He defended Alexander but
damned Trotter as “utterly wanting in truth or honor” for alleging that he
owned the Colored American Magazine , now removed to New York. “The fact
is, I do not own a dollar’s worth of interest in a single Negro publication in
this country.” If this was technically accurate, the next claim that he did not
subsidize the Negro press was certainly false. Garrison did not wish to know
the worst about Washington, and he did not learn what he did not want to
know. Du Bois, a victim of the Tuskegee Machine, had a far less sentimental
view of Washington than did Garrison. 62

By early 1909, Villard expressed reservations about Washington’s course in
print, and his uncle, as usual, concurred. On the eve of the first NAACP
conference Garrison wrote: “I am glad you have written so plainly and frankly
to Booker Washington. I imagine he will stay away from the conference, and
yet it seems strange to have a Negro conference without BTW; but I fear he
would be much too politic in his utterances.” In the aftermath of the meeting,
Garrison was pleased with Washington’s diplomacy in staying away, for, as
the Tuskegean himself had advised Villard, Garrison observed, “his presence
might have hampered discussion and ... would surely have invited the embit¬
tered attacks of the Trotter gang and so done infinite harm.” Just a few days
later, however, Washington had been much less diplomatic on his home terri¬
tory. “I do not at all like the tenor of Booker Washington’s speech at the
Business Men’s Conference [probably the NNBL] as reported in yesterday’s
paper,” Garrison wrote, “and it seems to me as if he had gratuitously slurred
and reflected on the work and purpose of the [civil rights] Conference by
minimizing the importance of the vote and magnifying the value of money.”
The alliance between the descendants of the abolitionists and Washington
was over, as was the peak of the latter’s power. 63

Booker T. Washington 81

In its place was a mixture of respect, hostility, and forced cooperation.
Throughout his career, Washington had made a series of speaking tours
through the South, addressing interracial audiences with his message of
goodwill toward whites and the self-improvement of black people. “You are
right in saying BTW*s true line of work is in such missionary expeditions,”
Garrison wrote his nephew in December 1909. “Your uncle William [Lloyd
Garrison Jr.] long ago said that his Tuskegee work was the least part of his
mission, and that his journeys and speeches up and down the land were the
most important and far reaching.” 64

The NAACP was too much of a threat to Washington's position and the
personal enmity between Du Bois and Washington was too great for the
latter to refrain from attacking it and attempting to foment discord. Wash¬
ington tried to drive a wedge between its black and white members when Du
Bois unwisely used association letterhead in an anti-Washington circular let¬
ter; later Washington arranged scandalous press coverage of an interracial
dinner attended by some members under the auspices of the Cosmopolitan
Club. Villard and Garrison attempted to negotiate a middle ground: for civil
rights, but not anti-Washington. They feared the danger he might do among
their white supporters who also contributed to Tuskegee. While organizing
for the 1911 Boston NAACP convention, Garrison noted the presence of “so
many Tuskegee and Hampton constituents on our Honorary Committtee
that [Atlanta University President] Dr. [Horace] Bumstead hopes nothing
will be said by [Constitution League President John] Milholland or Du Bois
to alienate them.” He recognized that Washington might have dissuaded his
Boston-area white supporters from joining the association, but did not, for
fear that the effort might backfire. 65

Washington died in 1915, Garrison the following year. Toward the end of
their lives, there was little communication between the two; they had taken
different paths. That the proud descendant of the most notorious abolitionist
should have worked in harmony with the apostle of accommodation between
1899 an d 1909 shows much of the complexity of racial politics in Boston.

THREE

'*T*T***T*T*'

Race, Gender, and Class
The Legacy of Lucy Stone

Racism affected all areas of American life, including the campaign for
women's suffrage. This movement, rooted in the abolitionist crusade, turned
increasingly to white supremacist arguments between 1890 and 1920 to moti¬
vate votes for women. Middle-class northern suffragists, fearful of the voting
power of new immigrants, argued that the admission of literate and/or prop¬
ertied women to the ballot would offset the votes of immigrants in the North
or blacks in the South, who would fail the literacy or property tests. African-
American women, by contrast, adhered to the notion that all people had
natural political rights that must be respected.

Lucy Stone, the central leader of the New England suffragists from 1870
until her death in 1893, had impeccable credentials as an abolitionist of the
William Lloyd Garrison stripe. She defended the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendements against the opposition of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth
Cady Stanton. So too did her husband, Henry Brown Blackwell, who was
editor of the Womans Journal , the weekly newspaper of the New England
suffragists from 1870, and after 1890 of the national movement. Their daugh¬
ter Alice Stone Blackwell edited the newspaper from 1909 until its demise in
1917. She grew up in the circle of abolitionists, suffragists, and reformers
inhabited by her parents. All three members of this remarkable family on the
leading edge of American reform argued that women’s suffrage would ensure
white supremacy in the South. Henry Blackwell in particular tried to con¬
vince the white South that female suffrage would bolster white supremacy;
all three wanted to encourage the growing southern suffrage movement. After
the death of her father in 1909, and especially after the victory of women’s
suffrage in 1920, Alice Stone Blackwell became increasingly radical. No
longer constrained by the tactical necessity of compromising with southern

84 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

white feminists, she embraced a range of causes that included civil rights,
defense of accused anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and
socialism.

Two leading African-American women of Boston, Josephine St. Pierre
Ruffin and Maria L. Baldwin, stood for civil rights and women’s suffrage in
this period. Each in her unique way contributed to building viable institutions
in the black community. African-American women had a different set of
political priorities than white women. While Ruffin and Baldwin admired the
white suffragists for their abolitionist backgrounds and current work, female
suffrage was necessarily a lower item on their agendas. They organized as
black women, but the emphasis of their work was on race, which in their eyes
marked the great divide in American life.

Despite this difference in perspective, black and white feminists cooper¬
ated with one another to a limited extent. Both shared the same ultimate
goal: the removal of race and gender bars to political equality. Their ideas
were rooted in Emersonian notions of equal opportunity and individual tran¬
scendence. Both white and black suffragists in Boston also shared an elite
class perspective. Despite their differing priorities, both African-American
and white campaigners for women’s rights were heirs to a New England
reform tradition that united them in spirit and sometimes in action.

THE LEGACY OF LUCY STONE

Lucy Stone (1818-1893) lived a full life in the vanguard of nineteenth-century
American reform. Born a simple farm girl in western Massachusetts, she
decided as a child to attend college in order to learn to read the Bible in what
she thought was its original language, to see if God had really created the
genders unequal. Against her father’s wishes, she worked her way through
Oberlin College as a teacher, becoming the first New England woman to
earn a college degree. After Oberlin she traveled as a professional lecturer for
the abolitionist movement, and through participation in that crusade devel¬
oped her early feminist inclinations. She soon confronted a central dilemma
in American reform: How should the movements against racism and sexism
relate to each other? In consultation with her abolitionist colleague Samuel
May, she decided to lecture part-time, separately, for each goal so as not to
champion both unpopular causes from the same platform. With the aid of
William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips she organized the first national
women’s rights convention in Worcester in 1850, and the conventions were
held annually thereafter except for 1857. Throughout the antebellum period

The Legacy of Lucy Stone 85

Stone led the life of a poor and itinerant organizer for abolition and women’s
rights. 1

Like Susan B. Anthony, Stone was determined to stay single and indepen¬
dent of a man’s will. Henry Blackwell (1825-1909) of Cincinnati wore down
her resistance in 1855, anc ^ they were married by abolitionist minister Thomas
Wentworth Higginson, with Stone keeping her own name, an unprecedented
decision. Blackwell had a hardware business, but he also participated in bold
antislavery actions that earned him the threats of Kentuckians from across
the Ohio River. Two of Blackwell’s sisters were the pioneering female doctors
Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell. Stone and Blackwell moved to Dorchester in
1870 (the year after its annexation to Boston) and participated in a variety of
reform causes. Blackwell edited the Womans Journal from its birth in 1870 to
his death in 1909. 2

During the Civil War they supported the troops on the home front and
raised their only child. The women’s suffrage movement revived again after
the war and divided into two camps, primarily over the question of the Four¬
teenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The New York-based National Woman’s
Suffrage Association, led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
actively opposed the amendments because they introduced the word “male”
into the Constitution. The National favored a women-only organization, a
federal amendment to secure women’s suffrage, and a wider feminist agenda,
including easier divorce laws. They reinforced this program with a wide-
ranging critique of church, big business, and state. Lucy Stone and Julia Ward
Howe led the American Woman’s Suffrage Association, which reversed these
positions in favor of a single-issue coalition on the suffrage question, open to
men, motivated by an appeal to male chivalry. The two tendencies formed
separate groups in 1870, with the Womans Journal as the organ of the Ameri¬
can and two short-lived and erratic journals representing the National.

If the National was more radical in its feminism, it was also more conserva¬
tive in its view of the race question. Both Stanton and Anthony had partici¬
pated in the antislavery crusade, but they believed that after women got the
vote, and only then, would other reforms be possible. Any means to the end
of women’s suffrage therefore seemed plausible to them, and they relied upon
a notorious race-baiter, George Francis Train, for advice and funds. Stanton
derided the enfranchisement of “Africans, Chinese, and all the ignorant for¬
eigners the moment they touch our shores,” and she referred to African-
Americans as “Sambo.” They actively campaigned against the postwar
amendments. Anthony even asked her friend Frederick Douglass to stay away
from the reunited National American Woman’s Suffrage Association’s At¬
lanta convention . 3

86 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

Whatever their limitations, the New Englanders never used racist language
and they supported the civil rights and enfranchisement of African-Ameri¬
cans. The New England suffrage campaign was carried out in an abolitionist
milieu. Stone and Blackwell counted among their friends various members of
the Garrison and Grimke families. American leaders Julia Ward Howe,
Ednah D. Cheney, and Mary A. Livermore had all contributed to the anti¬
slavery movement. Stone was especially close to Wendell Phillips. If these
reformers had gained in respectability, still they all had been radical reform¬
ers. As a group, they stood in contrast to the National leadership on the race
question. 4

By 1890, however, most of their differences had narrowed. During the
twenty years of separation, women’s suffrage won wider support as women
increasingly entered the workforce and gained the confidence to press for
their rights. Technological improvements freed housewives from domestic
chores. University education gained ground in the middle class. As the South
modernized and became more urban, the women’s suffrage movement ad¬
vanced. Massachusetts women won the right to vote on education questions
in 1879, and Wyoming joined the Union with full female suffrage in 1890.
Alice Stone Blackwell, representing a younger generation that took for
granted the evolved consciousness of the late nineteenth century, helped en¬
gineer the reunification. In general, the principles of the American group
prevailed. However, with the substance of the Reconstruction amendments
under increased attack, neither side wished to link what seemed to be an
extraneous issue to the suffragist campaign. The National retained the presi¬
dency of the new National American Woman Suffrage Association
(NAWSA), but the Womans Journal became the official organ of the associa¬
tion. 5

In The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement , 1890-1920, Aileen S. Kradi-
tor accurately described the changes that took place in suffragist thinking
during this period. Kraditor argued that “the suffrage movement was essen¬
tially from beginning to end a struggle of white, native-born, middle class
women for the right to participate more fully in the public affairs of a society
the basic structure of which they accepted.” She noted as well that as the
older, abolitionist-trained leaders passed from the scene, the new leaders who
took their places were more conservative in their racial views. “In this period,
too, the first suffrage organizations appeared in the South,” she observed.
“The Southern suffrage movement was a white woman’s movement, and
the participation of Southern individuals and organizations in the NAWSA
signified a permanent break with the abolitionist tradition from which the
women’s rights organizations had sprung.” 6

The Legacy of Lucy Stone 87

Contemporaneous with this process was a broader evolution of the suffrage
movement’s argumentation from a demand for justice to an appeal to “expe¬
diency.” This meant that suffrage leaders dropped the line that women should
be granted the vote because it was their natural right, and replaced it with
the idea that women’s suffrage would guarantee the hegemony of the elites
that were besieged by foreign immigrants or African-Americans. These
groups also were demanding “rights,” and the suffragists gradually distanced
themselves from them and their line of argument. By granting the vote to
educated or propertied women only, the proportionate weight of the respect¬
able classes would be increased. Only by the end of the period did the sepa¬
rate working-class women’s groups unite in action with the suffragists. When
African-American women even tried to join, they were rebuffed. 7

Kraditor’s conceptual framework best explains what happened to the bear¬
ers of Boston’s antislavery tradition as they went about the fight for women’s
rights. Limited by its Protestant middle-class orientation, operating in a city
where an immigrant and Irish-Catholic working class was taking control,
disillusioned by the results of Reconstruction, the Bostonians appealled to
class hegemony to justify women’s suffrage. As early as 1867, Henry Blackwell
advanced the idea that women’s suffrage could be limited to the literate and
propertied. The presentation of this argument became more pronounced
later, as wider layers of white middle-class reformers retreated on the race
question. 8

Between 1890 and 1920 the Womans journal argued that the best way to
ensure white supremacy in the South was to enfranchise literate or propertied
women voters. Sometimes this line was coupled with an appeal for adequate
schooling, which would encourage racial equality in a distant future, but often
it was not. The weekly took no notice of the violence that accompanied
the disfranchisement of even literate and propertied African-American men
during the same period. Although both civil rights activists and feminists
were addressing the same question in American life—Who shall vote?—the
white women suffragists divorced the questions of African-American and
female suffrage completely. Gradually southern women introduced their
views of the question, some of which were extremely racist, until at the 1903
New Orleans NAWSA convention, their vigorously expressed views on race
went unanswered by the northerners.

Henry Blackwell’s argument was blunt. In 1890, using statistics from the
1880 census for the southern states, he showed that literate white women
outnumbered literate African-American women by 11 to 1. Advocates of
women’s suffrage, he argued, were calling only for the enfranchisement of
literate and/or propertied women. Massachusetts, he proudly asserted, had a

88 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

literacy and property requirement for male voters. Even in a state like South
Carolina, where illiterates could vote, and the black population at least
equaled the white population and exceeded it in some areas, the enfranchise¬
ment of literate women would guarantee white supremacy. “How can the
negro vote be freely cast and fairly counted without endangering social order
and political stability?” he asked. “The illiterate, irresponsible voters, who
now too often constitute a legal majority, must be controlled by the honest
ballots of the civilized, responsible members of the community .” 9

The question came up again in 1894, when the NAWSA scheduled its first
convention in the South, at Atlanta the following winter. Elizabeth Cady
Stanton extended Blackwell's argument, writing that all new voters, male and
female, North and South, should be literate in English. This would help
protect native-born American workers from the ignorant votes of foreigners.
When reader Anna Gardner of Massachusetts protested that Stantons pro¬
posal was really an antilabor measure that would weaken the poorest men
and women, Blackwell sprang to Stanton's defense, crafting a more nuanced
version of his earlier proposals. “Circumstances alter cases,” he argued. In
cities like New York or Chicago, with their large immigrant populations, an
unrestricted ballot would lead to “slavery of the masses to political bosses,
and a bastard aristocracy of thieves, liquor sellers and gamblers.” Of course,
it was reasonable in states with mostly white, native-born populations like
those of the West, to call for the unrestricted ballot. In the South, however,
“illiterate, unconditional suffrage was forced by federal authority on the reluc¬
tant South, after the war as a political necessity. In that entire section it would
be impossible to secure by voluntary action a similar extension of the suffrage
to women.” Southern suffragists must call for the education requirement. 10

Blackwell's friend and colleague William Lloyd Garrison II disagreed. He
referred Womans Journal readers to a speech by Frederick Douglass, given in
Washington and Boston earlier that year. Douglass pointed out that if an
educational test was added, the whites would bar the blacks from getting an
education. “I would not make suffrage more exclusive, but more inclusive,”
Douglass said, calling for the unrestricted ballot. “Much thoughtless speech
is heard about the ignorance of the Negro in the South, but plainly enough
it is not the ignorance of the Negro but the malevolence of his accusers which
is the real cause of southern disorder .” 11

The debate continued almost until the end of the year, with Stanton sug¬
gesting that the existing educational requirement be stiffened. “If Mr. Garri¬
son belonged to a disfranchised class he might more keenly feel the
humiliation of a foreign yoke,” she protested, and later argued that a Kansas
suffrage referendum might have been lost to ignorant immigrant voters.

The Legacy of Lucy Stone 89

Anna Gardner replied that Stanton “would have class legislation”; Garrison,
who had just set a memorial stone at the grave of Wendell Phillips on the
tenth anniversary of his death, replied with a quote from Phillips: “The white
South hates universal suffrage; the so-called cultivated North distrusts it .” 12

At the heart of the question of universal suffrage was the matter of the
social class of the New England suffragists, including the Stone-Blackwell
family. This in turn related to their feelings about the city around them. Both
Blackwell and Stone were born to humble but enterprising parents and both
had known hard work, but not poverty, as children and young adults. By the
time they married in 1855, Blackwell had a developing hardware business, and
after they moved to Dorchester in 1870 he became interested in real estate
and prospered. 13 The once-scorned reform group was celebrated after the
Civil War, and Blackwell and Stone inhabited this respectable space. Al¬
though Blackwell was then a champion of such unusual causes as the plight
of the Jews and Armenians abroad, he also favored a sound currency and
Canadian trade reciprocity as conservative financial bulwarks against the en¬
croachments of a populace inclined to inflationary and free trade measures.
Blackwell was a social progressive, generally, but, like many other old reform¬
ers of his day such as Moorfield Storey or Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
an economic conservative. 14

His class feeling was probably exacerbated by his suffrage views. Boston
was a center not only of the suffrage movement, but also of the antisuffrage
movement. In 1895, the state legislature rebuffed the annual appeal for wom¬
en’s suffrage by scheduling a nonbinding “mock” referendum on municipal
suffrage for women. Both men and women could participate. Only 23,000
women cast ballots, overwhelmingly in favor by a 25-1 margin. Men, however,
cast 187,837 nays against 108,974 yeas, and the referendum was defeated. Alice
Stone Blackwell laconically noted, “There was the smallest affirmative vote
in the most disreputable wards of Boston.” To Protestant Bostonians in 1895,
“disreputable” meant “Irish” or “immigrant.” To the middle-class suffragists,
reform projects had to be won against the backward working classes. 15

The hostility to immigrants that informed the arguments of Stanton and
Blackwell in 1894 became interlinked with their paternalistic subordination
of black rights to women’s rights. The North, Blackwell asserted, was chas¬
tened by its exposure to the immigrants. Having imperiously dictated its
conception of class relations to the South in the past, it was now ready to see
the South’s point of view about rule by an intelligent ballot, rather than by
mobocracy. 16

There were limits to this approach, however. The Womans Journal cele¬
brated and upheld the abolitionist tradition, for it was too much a part of the

90 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

early lives of Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and the older participants in the
suffrage campaign. The weekly also approved of the self-organization and
uplift campaigns of African-American women. During the encampment of
the Grand Army of the Republic in Boston in August 1890, the Womans
Journal praised the comradely intermingling of white and black veterans, and
when Newburyport unveiled a monument to William Lloyd Garrison, Lucy
Stone waxed enthusiastic about her old comrade. Frederick Douglass's 1894
visit to Boston included a warm reception by hundreds of NAWSA members.
The Womans Journal reported on various gatherings of African-American
women's organizations, and Garrison II and Blackwell addressed the found¬
ing meeting of the Federation of Afro-American Women. To uphold the
abolitionist tradition was not the same, however, as to uphold Reconstruc¬
tion. Newly allied with southern women, the northerners granted that the
ballot was not a natural right, but a privilege to be earned by education or
property. 17

The family was not unaware of the situation in the South, since they read
the newspapers and traveled there themselves. Responding to a proposal to
establish a family “settlement" in the South, Alice dissuaded her aunt Ellen
from pursuing the idea. “[Uncle George] says when Emma was at Thomas-
ville she gathered a little class of colored children and tried to teach them to
read, and this at once caused her to be regarded with suspicion by the whites,
who do not like to have the colored people taught," she wrote in 1903. 18

In a telling communication to her cousin Emma, she confided her delight
in Booker Washington’s 1901 White House dinner with President Theodore
Roosevelt. “I think one has a little physical repulsion from black people until
one knows them, but if on acquaintance one finds them nice, it quickly goes
off.” Compared to any white northerner in 1901, Alice Blackwell was certainly
liberal in her racial views, but as the daughter of Lucy Stone, comrade of
Frederick Douglass, this sentiment marked a retrogression from the experi¬
ence of the earlier generation. 19

To accomplish its reconciliation with the South, the Womans Journal had
to maintain a discreet silence about race relations there. In fairness, this might
be justified in that the weekly was the organ of the suffrage movement, and
the voice of women’s wider concerns. It was not bound to address all in¬
stances of oppression everywhere. On the other hand, the newspaper did take
up the particular concerns of Henry and Alice: fourteen editorials on the
Armenian question and many more articles appeared in 1896 alone. These
were linked to the newspaper's mission by focusing on the plight of women
and child refugees. However, the link between the oppression of Armenians
abroad and American women was tenuous, whereas the connection between

The Legacy of Lucy Stone 91

the oppression of African-Americans and American women was manifest.
Nevertheless, when Mississippi disfranchised black men in 1890, Lucy Stone
decried its failure to enfranchise women, saying nothing about the African-
Americans. The issue was directly raised at the NAWSA 1899 convention
at Grand Rapids, Michigan, by an African-American woman delegate. She
demanded that the NAWSA pass a resolution against segregated railways—it
was the NAWSA’s business because the category of “Negroes” included
women. Susan B. Anthony squelched the resolution, and the Womans Journal
failed to report it. 20

When the movement scheduled its 1903 convention in the Crescent City,
the New Orleans Times-Democrat attacked the NAWSA for its allegedly
northern-influenced views on the race question. The NAWSA leadership
responded with a diplomatically worded statement declaring that the associa¬
tion simply wished to remove the disabilities of gender from the law. On
race, the association had no opinion and each state campaigned for women’s
suffrage as it saw fit. 21 However, in the friendly New Orleans setting, and
with the encouragement of the Times-Democrat attack, Mississippi delegate
Belle Kearney expounded upon “durable white supremacy.” She argued the
view of politicians like Mississippi’s James K. Vardaman that even Booker
Washington’s project posed a threat to Anglo-Saxon civilization. Kearney
borrowed statistics and arguments from Blackwell’s 1890 editorial, but con¬
cluded that whites should permanently dominate African-Americans. Black
women were barred from the convention. Only Carrie Chapman Catt de¬
murred on the part of the northerners, and in defensive tones. The relation¬
ship of forces had shifted so that the extreme racist southern view now
seemed linked to women’s suffrage. 22

Alice Stone Blackwell received a warm reception from her hosts during the
convention and was swept away by a combination of moonlight, magnolias,
and modernization. The convention buildup promised a visit to “the old
plantation home, the garden . . . the darkies and the darky quarters ... a
touch of romance to everything connected with ‘ante-bellum times.’ ” Her
convention coverage in the Woman's Journal featured a lengthy report on the
atmosphere of the city, with its riverboats, antiques, French and Spanish
architecture, bustling commerce and new industry. The Kearney speech was
reprinted in full, but not mentioned in the news coverage. The Womans Jour¬
nal rated the gathering as a whole as an unqualified success from which every¬
one departed happily. 23

After the convention, Henry Blackwell blessed the proceedings in an edi¬
torial that summarized his current thinking. Reconstruction had been
wrongly forced upon the South, but now the injustice was being undone: “the

92 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

suffrage has been wrenched from the Negro population, thereby eliminating
much of the dominant illiteracy and corruption.” Foreigners in the North,
subservient to “great mill owners, corporations, and capitalists” were similarly
degrading the sanctity of the ballot in that section. Educated female suffrage
was the remedy. Given Blackwell’s conservative economic views, his declama¬
tion against “capitalists” should not be interpreted as populism, but as a back¬
ward-looking longing for the New England village, free of factories and
foreigners and full of native-born artisans. 24

Blackwell’s old friend and collaborator William Lloyd Garrison II was
disgusted by the entire performance. It was not “illiteracy and corruption”
that was being disfranchised, he wrote, but the Negro people, including the
literate and honest. This was accomplished by means of violence. The offend¬
ing editorial was in line with the “policy of timid silence” adopted by northern
suffragists at the New Orleans convention. An imperialist war (this reference
was to the Philippines) furthered the atmosphere of racism. At New Orleans,
the northerners had fallen under the sway of southern hospitality, and, not
wishing to offend their gracious hosts, capitulated. “For the Womans Journal
to hold up these blood-stained hands and applaud this degenerate condition
is astounding.” 25

To Alice Stone Blackwell fell the difficult task of reconciling the New
England conscience with southern reality, in reply to Garrison. The poll tax
and educational tests, she argued, were valid measures. It was true that in the
South they were often used unfairly to the disadvantage of the Negro, but
that did not invalidate the wisdom of the laws. “Speaking simply for myself
as an individual, my own view is that when the majority of the people are
below a certain point in intelligence and character, democratic government is
impossible; and that in the Southern states most of the Negroes (and many
of the whites) were below that level.” At any rate, Garrison’s criticisms of the
northern suffragists was unfair. The NAWSA was a single-issue coalition,
and while it may have been inappropriate for the southerners to raise the race
question at New Orleans, the northerners were under no obligation to state
their own views. Besides, Mrs. Catt’s diplomatic rejoinder had been suffi¬
cient. 26 The contemporary reader should recall the wider context of this de¬
bate: Booker Washington was the unchallenged spokesman of the race, so far
as any white folk knew in early 1903, and if he accepted segregation at south¬
ern meetings, why should suffragists object?

Underpinning the argument of both Blackwells was their nervousness
about the shifting class and ethnic relations in Boston. Like other middle-
class Protestants, Henry Blackwell viewed with alarm the growing power of
Irish voters. In a series of editorials around the time of the New Orleans

The Legacy of Lucy Stone 93

convention, he hailed the establishment of a good government committee to
curb corruption in municipal government. He complained that 70 percent of
Boston voters did not pay their poll tax, while the authorities looked the
other way. For her part, Alice Stone Blackwell, in her capacity as a state
suffrage leader, argued before the legislature that women’s suffrage would not
increase the foreign vote, as only one-third of the immigrants were women.
Women’s suffrage in Massachusetts was thus motivated by an appeal to class
stability. 27

Between 1903 and 1920, Massachusetts suffragists never again paid the race
question sustained attention. Henry Blackwell died in 1909, and Alice Stone
Blackwell steered the paper in a direction more friendly to the working
classes, covering, for example, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 with
great anger toward the ownership. One more suffrage referendum was held
in Massachusetts, in 1915, and it lost overwhelmingly, by a 2-1 margin, in
every city and town except two. The vote in Boston was also about 2-1 in
every ward of the city. This demoralizing defeat took a great deal of energy
out of the suffrage movement. Financial difficulties hurt the Womans Journal
also, and it published its last number in 1917. 28

The national suffrage victory in 1920 seemed to liberate Blackwell’s per¬
sonal radicalism. She lived until 1950 and joined an array of reform organiza¬
tions that included the Women’s Trade Union League, the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the American
Peace Society. She helped found the League of Women Voters. Her political
views shifted leftward even as reform nationally gave out during the 1920s,
and she became an avowed socialist. Convinced of the innocence of accused
anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, she worked on their de¬
fense and corresponded regularly with Vanzetti. The course of her later career
suggests that the campaign for women’s suffrage, with its attendant coalition
with southern racists, retarded the development of her broader sympathies.
Only after 1920 could she join the NAACP, and speak out for the rights of
labor and immigrants. In a sense, she had come home to the place from
which her mother had begun. 29

AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN CONFRONT JIM CROW

The political rights of African-American women were doubly denied. Female
black Bostonians could win votes for women, but their sisters in the South
would still be disfranchised. Therefore, they appealed to the natural rights
argument to demand an unrestricted ballot. In this, they were more consis¬
tently democratic than white suffragists, but women’s suffrage was a low pri-

94 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

ority among their concerns. Boston’s leading African-American women
necessarily had a different agenda than that of white suffragists. They orga¬
nized as women to defend their race and gender, but the overwhelming reality
of increased racial oppression focused their energy on such issues as lynching,
disfranchisement, and segregation.

The two most prominent Boston African-American women of this period
consistently supported women’s suffrage. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and
Maria Baldwin organized the Woman’s Era Club in 1893 to defend the honor
of African-American women, display their accomplishments, motivate the
uplift of their poorer sisters, and fight for civil rights as women. Ruffin orga¬
nized and led this work; Baldwin, as the first African-American administrator
of an almost all-white school, exemplified the virtues of intelligence, courage,
and modesty that the club movement upheld. In this, they drew upon the
city’s abolitionist tradition and on the social club model elaborated by Bos¬
ton’s Brahmin elite. Neither woman possessed much wealth, but both were
leaders of Boston’s black upper class by dint of character and accomplish¬
ment. They were affected by the militant versus accommodationist split in
black politics, but less so than men were. Probably neither woman joined the
Niagara movement, and both were associated with the NAACP, but played
minor roles. Ruffin, who did her most important work after her husband’s
death, and Baldwin, who never married, made their own plans independently
of men. Ruffin became famous for attempting to integrate the General Feder¬
ation of Women’s Clubs, and Baldwin was celebrated as an African-Ameri¬
can educational leader, not as a woman schoolmaster.

John Daniels, a white social worker and observer of African-American
Boston, wrote in 1914 that black women were relatively more powerful within
their community than white women were in relation to white men. The
reason, simply, was economic. Many more black women were forced to work,
relative to the proportion of white women. This conjecture was not entirely
borne out by the facts. Of Boston’s 350,207 employed workers in 1920, 245,905
were male and 104,302 were female. Of these workers, 9,984 were African-
American, 3,224 of whom were female. Thus the proportions were roughly
the same. Nevertheless, there is probably a kernel of truth in Daniels’s hy¬
pothesis: the African-American workers, male and female, were clustered at
the very bottom of the job categories, so the proportion of income contrib¬
uted to the family by black women was greater than that contributed by white
women. If Daniels’s facts were wrong, his insight into African-American
gender relations has merit and contributes to an understanding of the special
importance of the African-American women’s club movement, in compari¬
son to the white women’s club movement . 30

The Legacy of Lucy Stone 95

Daniels estimated a membership of about 750 for these clubs in the Greater
Boston area. In 1915, the clubwomen mobilized their own protest against the
showing of The Birth of a Nation, and the Boston Globe estimated that eight
hundred women participated, so in the absence of official statistics, Daniels’s
approximation is probably workable. Boston’s total black population was
13,651 in 1910 and 16,350 in 1920; thus a very high percentage (roughly 10
percent, if we use the 1920 figure and assume that half the population was
female) of African-American women were affiliated with these clubs either as
members or supporters. Clubs existed in Boston, Cambridge, Everett, West
Medford, and Salem in the Boston area and nearby in Worcester and New
Bedford. 31

Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin (1842-1924) was the outstanding leader of this
movement in Boston, and played a crucial role in bringing together the move¬
ment nationally. Her father was racially mixed and her mother was an En¬
glish immigrant; the children were very light-skinned. St. Pierre was a
clothing dealer and founder of the Zion Church. Her parents refused to send
her to the segregated Boston schools, so she studied in Salem until the local
schools were desegregated in 1855. At sixteen she married George L. Ruffin,
a freeborn African-American migrant from Virginia. During the Civil War
they contributed to homefront campaigns; afterward George Ruffin became
the first African-American to graduate from the Harvard Law School. Ruffin
became the most prominent African-American political figure of his day in
Boston, serving as city councillor, state legislator, and municipal judge in
Charlestown, a position he held until his death in 1886. The Ruffins had five
children.

Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin participated in a range of community activities.
She organized the Kansas Relief Association in Boston during the exodus of
southern African-Americans to that state. She also worked with the Associ¬
ated Charities of Boston, the Massachusetts Moral Education Association,
and the Massachusetts School Suffrage Association. Through these latter
activities she met Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and other leaders of the
suffrage movement. In the 1890s she worked as an editor on the Boston
Courant , the black community newspaper. 32

She was an imposing woman of fifty when she traveled to New York in
October 1892 to hear Ida B. Wells speak against lynching. Earlier that year
Wells had written from Memphis about the lynching of three African-Amer¬
ican businessmen, and had been driven from that city by threats. Later, prob¬
ably in February 1893, Wells came to Boston and spoke privately at Ruffin’s
home, to black women around New England, and publicly to several white
audiences, thus laying the basis for African-American women’s clubs.

96 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

During the same period, African-American women in New York, Chicago,
and Washington were also organizing. The Washington, D.C., group was
the largest and most important. Led by Mary Church Terrell, the daughter
of a Memphis millionaire and wife of a future judge, the Colored Women’s
League was rooted among the administrators and teachers in the African-
American public schools. 33

The Boston group held a public meeting in May 1893, at which Laura
Ormiston Chant of England, and Boston suffrage leaders Lucy Stone, Ednah
Cheney, and Abby Morton Diaz spoke. This was Stone’s last speech in Bos¬
ton before her death, and the first issue of the Womans Era , appearing one
year later, memorialized her on the first page. The women took her last
words, “Make the World Better,” as its motto. The club was to be led by
African-American women, but was open to all. Its constitution stated broadly
conceived goals, pledging to work against lynching, to show the progress of
the race, but also to work for oppressed women everywhere, be they Chinese,
Hawaiian, or Russian Jews. 34

Meanwhile, Ida B. Wells entered into a dispute with English reformers
that had impact upon America. Wells criticized fellow American lecturers
preacher Dwight Moody and Frances Willard, leader of the Women’s Chris¬
tian Temperance Union, for equivocating about lynching. Their presentation
of the problem suggested that Negroes might really be inclined to commit
rape, and that women, bearers of morality, were generally to be believed
when they alleged that their honor had been besmirched. Wells argued that
lynching victims were usually not even accused of rape, that lynching and rape
were not connected in reality, and that Moody and Willard were obscuring an
important issue. Wells hoped that the English would pressure their American
associates to take action against lynching, but Willard’s host turned against
Wells instead. 35

Ruffin defended Wells throughout this episode. In June 1894, the Womans
Era published an open letter to Laura Ormiston Chant, the English reformer
who had spoken at the club’s first meeting. The Era charged that Chant had
blocked an antilynching resolution at a Unitarian Church conference. It then
reprised the substance of the Wells-Willard debate. In an accompanying edi¬
torial, Ruffin accused Willard and Chant of valuing temperance over racial
justice, and of apologizing for lynching. Further articles in July and August
kept the pressure up. The Womans Era declared a partial victory in December
when Willard vowed to resign from her own woman’s club if it was found to
bar African-American women. 36

This continuing controversy led to the Boston group’s launching a national
club movement. In March 1895, a Missouri newspaper editor, John W. Jack,

The Legacy of Lucy Stone 97

wrote a letter to Florence Balgarnie, the leader of the British antilynching
campaign, in which he vilified colored women as habitual liars and sexual
degenerates. The Womans Era told the story without publishing the letter,
and used the incident as a catalyst to convene a national convention of the
proliferating African-American women’s clubs . 37

The idea of holding a national conference had percolated among Washing¬
ton, D.C., Boston, and Chicago women from at least the time of the Chicago
Columbian Exposition in 1892-93. Personal rivalries prevented any positive
action in that direction. In the June 1894 Womans Era , Fannie Barrier Wil¬
liams, a Chicago leader, suggested waiting at least two to three years before
convening a national gathering. Meetings among men frequently were a
waste of time and the same might be true for women, she wrote. However,
the Jack letter crystallized sentiment for the event, and in its May 1895 issue,
the Womans Era announced that a meeting would be held. “Boston has been
selected as a meeting place because it has seemed to be the general opinion
that here, and here only, can be found the atmosphere which would best
interpret and represent us, our position, our needs and our aims,” Ruffin
declared. She did not explain how the actual decision was made to go ahead
with the conference. In effect, she had proceeded against the inclinations of
Williams and Terrell. 38

The meeting was held 29-31 July at Boston’s Berkeley Hall, with an extra
session held 1 August at the Charles Street AME Church. One hundred
and four delegates representing fourteen states and the District of Columbia
attended. The sessions addressed topics such as “Women and Higher Educa¬
tion,” “Need of Organization,” “Industrial Training,” “Individual Work for
Moral Elevation,” “Political Equality,” “Social Purity,” and “Temperance.” A
secret session was held to discuss the Jack letter. The delegates passed resolu¬
tions endorsing the work of Wells, condemning the Georgia convict system,
and opposing lynching in general. Ruffin delivered a welcoming address that
tied together these various themes in the context of the Jack letter. Slander,
she said, had been employed by white southern women to keep black women
out of national organizations. “Now with an army of organized women stand¬
ing for purity and mental worth,” colored women were ready to refute their
accusations. “We want, we ask the active interest of our men, and too, we are
not drawing the color line,” she declared. As proof of this last point, white
Bostonians Henry B. Blackwell and William Lloyd Garrison addressed the
session “Political Equality,” as did African-American journalist Timothy
Thomas Fortune and educator Dr. Alexander Crummell. The conference
launched the National Federation of Afro-American Women, headed by

98 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

Margaret Murray Washington, a principal at Tuskegee and the wife of
Booker T. Washington.

This meeting represented only a step in the direction of unifying the wom¬
en’s clubs, for the Washington, D.C.-based League of Colored Women still
maintained a separate structure. Mary Church Terrell did not attend the Bos¬
ton meeting. In addition, there were tensions within the federation that re¬
flected differing political viewpoints among the women. The delegates
approved a resolution backing the Women’s Christian Temperance Union
over the objection of the Bostonians. Ruffin continued her editorial barrage
against Willard. She objected also to the appellation “Afro-American” in the
name of the new group, probably for integrationist reasons. These minor
squabbles aside, the two groups successfully merged in 1896, electing Terrell
president but retaining the Womans Era as the organ of the new National
Association of Colored Women (NACW). The association claimed to unite
more than two hundred groups nationally. 39

In general, Ruffin tended toward more militant views than her collabora¬
tors Williams and Terrell. These two women had husbands who later came
to depend upon Booker Washington for their positions. Ruffin was always
closer to Ida B. Wells, who around this time married a Washington oppo¬
nent. In 1899, Terrell persuaded Booker Washington to block W. E. B. Du
Bois from gaining an assistant superintendency of the Washington, D.C.,
schools, a position she coveted for her husband. That same year Terrell
bypassed the now-named Wells-Barnett as host of the NACW’s Chicago
convention. Only with Ruffin’s assistance did Wells-Barnett address the dele¬
gates in her own home town. While nothing suggests that Ruffin was an
opponent of Booker Washington (she had worked with Margaret Murray
Washington in the short-lived federation) she also wished to include mili¬
tants like Wells-Barnett. 40

In Boston community politics, Ruffin sometimes adopted “militant” posi¬
tions herself. In 1895 the Womans Era attacked the “servile compliance” of
African-American state representative Robert Teamoh, who failed to con¬
front the Virginia governor who rebuffed him during an official visit. A few
years later, Ruffin protested attempts to remove Isaac Allen, an African-
American Republican machine politician of dubious character who was
elected to the Governor’s Council because his name suggested that he was a
white man. On national matters, the Womans Era questioned the advisability
of colored people participating in the 1895 Atlanta Exposition. A July 1895
editorial pointed to the disfranchisement of South Carolina blacks and in¬
creasing segregation as signs that “our position grows worse” in the South,
while northern whites refused to protest. Colored people should leave the

The Legacy of Lucy Stone 99

South to improve their lot, Ruffin argued. While the paper sometimes praised
Frederick Douglass, it discreetly said little about the ascendant Booker T.
Washington . 41

At the same time, Ruffin and the Womans Era were firmly rooted in Bos¬
ton’s black upper class and did share core values with other upper-class club¬
women. The Womans Era reported regularly on the teas and social events of
its set. Ruffin’s daughter Florida, who worked with her mother in the club
and on the newspaper, married into the prominent Ridley family; the Boston
Globe identified “the Ruffins and the Ridleys” as “the centers about which
swell society at the West End revolves.” Ruffin also presided over a sophisti¬
cated discussion group that impressed the young Harvard student W. E. B.
Du Bois. Mrs. Ruffin’s other children held responsible positions that elevated
her status in society . 42

The Womans Era cleaved to traditional Republican upper-class economic
values. Its very first issue, reporting a march of Boston’s unemployed, con¬
cluded that “labor problems, in a large measure must be left to adjust them¬
selves, creating work’ for the unemployed can do no permanent good.” Ruffin
worried that unemployed factory workers were becoming too proud to accept
jobs in domestic service. Immigration should be restricted, she urged. Too
many immigrants were but “criminals and traitors” in their native lands, and
they soon became typical racists after landing on American soil. During the
1896 presidential campaign, the Womans Era feared William Jennings Bryan
not as a racist, but as an economic radical whose free silver monetary policy
would lead to inflation. 43

The African-American women’s club movement itself embodied many tra¬
ditional values that fit into the philosophy of Booker Washington. “Lifting
as we climb,” the national club movement’s motto, expressed the educator’s
philosophy well. The agenda of the 1895 Boston convention, with its sessions
on temperance, social purity, and moral elevation made it easy for Margaret
Murray Washington to participate. The Woman’s Era Club encouraged insti¬
tution building, and helped sustain St. Monica’s Home for Sick Colored
Women and Children, an Episcopal project located in Roxbury. Ruffin’s
worldview thus embraced conservative economic values, black self-help and
institution-building on the one hand, and integration, defense of the ballot,
and opposition to lynching on the other. Where men might counterpose
these values, Ruffin saw merit in various approaches. 44

She was similarly diplomatic in relation to white suffragists. Ruffin sup¬
ported women’s suffrage and praised the white women who fought for it.
Lucy Stone gave the club its motto, and her picture adorned the platform of
the 1895 founding convention of the federation. The Womans Era argued that

ioo Boston Confronts Jim Crow

African-American women in particular would benefit from suffrage rights,
which would help them in the battle for full equality. Like white suffragists,
Ruffin considered the mock referendum of 1895 a fraud; the legislature ought
simply to give women the vote. Ruffin also cautioned white women not to
ignore their colored sisters. The Womans Era protested the choice of Atlanta
as a convention site for the 1895 meeting, since black women would be ex¬
cluded. She called on the Association for the Advancement of Women to
protest segregation and lynching, and to “cast aside policy and expediency
and boldly face this race question .” 45

Significandy, the Womans Era y despite these sentiments, generally kept a
distance from the suffrage movement. It did not campaign in 1895 around the
Massachusetts mock referendum for municipal suffrage. The Womans Era
never directly confronted the racist argument for women's suffrage that the
Womans Journal advanced. After the Womans Era stopped publishing, the
Colored American Magazine appeared in 1900 in Boston as a sophisticated,
upper-class literary journal. Pauline Hopkins, the leading writer for that mag¬
azine, had her doubts about suffrage. In part she accepted the traditional
“anti” notion of woman's place, but in part, she carried the logic of the Black-
well position to its conclusion. If female suffrage would guarantee white su¬
premacy, she then asked rhetorically, “Is it desirable for us as a race to place
the ballot in woman's hands?”

It is strange that the Womans Era never posed this question. The likeli¬
hood is that Ruffin did not want to start a fight with the white suffragists,
and guarded her silence over what was a less important question to her. The
NACW did not endorse women’s suffrage until 1912, although this was two
years before the General Federation of Women’s Clubs endorsed it. Women's
suffrage was not high on Ruffin's agenda. 46

This attitude toward suffrage probably reflected the sense that race, rather
than gender, was the more important problem in American life. Ruffin was
politically close to Ida B. Wells during the 1890s, and Wells was an admirer
of Susan B. Anthony. A chapter of Wells-Barnett's autobiography details her
admiration for Anthony, and her rejection of the white suffragist’s view that
votes for women would cure all social ills. Like Wells-Barnett, Ruffin's priori¬
ties suggest that she was skeptical of what are today termed “essentialist”
views of woman’s nature. She hoped to break down the racial barriers be¬
tween women. Her speech at the founding convention of the federation
shows that this goal was central to her concerns. Ruffin wanted to be accepted
as an equal among women, and believed that her personal victory would help
destroy the color line in society at large . 47

That project culminated in the most famous incident of Ruffin’s career,

The Legacy of Lucy Stone ioi

her attempt to integrate the General Federation of Women’s Clubs at its
1900 biennial meeting at Milwaukee. The Woman’s Era Club was an affiliate
of the state federation, and Ruffin was part of the Massachusetts state delega¬
tion. In addition she represented the New England Press Association at Mil¬
waukee. The General Federation, led by Georgian Rebecca Lowe, accepted
her credentials from the first two groups, but not as a representative of an
African-American club. Unaware of the Woman’s Era Club’s racial composi¬
tion, the General Federation accepted its dues, and Ruffin would not take
the money back. She demanded to be seated as a representative of her club
and race or not at all. However, Mrs. Lowe called the roll when the Massa¬
chusetts delegation was caucusing, and by means of this parliamentary ma¬
neuver a vote on Ruffin’s credentials was avoided. The Massachusetts
delegation later protested, and many northern women backed Ruffin as well.
During the convention, a prominent Milwaukee society woman demonstra¬
tively invited Ruffin to dinner. The debate was marked by hissing and hot
tempers, creating an unprecedented scene at the normally genteel federation
assemblies. The Ruffin issue dominated press reports of the convention as a
whole, at least in Boston.

Despite these impressive shows of support, Ruffin returned to Boston dis¬
appointed. “The Southern women proved themselves too clever politicians
for the Northern women” she said. In the election for new officers, the more
numerous northern women were split by a solid South that blocked with
the northern conservatives, and Lowe was reelected president amid a threat
by southerners to secede from the federation if the Woman’s Era Club was
recognized. With characteristic aplomb, Ruffin advised the Massachusetts
delegation against withdrawing from the national group. “Our people [Afri¬
can-Americans] are conservative and wish to avoid trouble, yet they do not
like to yield a principle,” she said. Nevertheless, she retained a lawyer and was
considering a suit against the general federation, which never materialized.
President Lowe reaffirmed her goodwill toward African-Americans and her
support for strict racial segregation . 48

A few weeks later, the Massachusetts delegation met and passed another
resolution condemning the treatment of Ruffin who “demonstrated the
splendid possibilities of her race.” The Boston Evening Transcript patronized
all the women by urging them to use their clubs as men used theirs: as an
escape from the real world of pressing problems. Ruffin herself claimed not
to be angry, but determined to press on. The parliamentary maneuver at
Milwaukee had only postponed the outcome, without sealing it . 49

The question was settled with less attendant publicity two years later at
Los Angeles. Probably because an unfavorable recommendation had been

io2 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

accepted by a Massachusetts committee between conventions, Ruffin decided
not to attend. In 1902, she would have been sixty years old and the journey
may have seemed too arduous or expensive. Ruffin’s own interests might have
been shifting; in 1902 she helped found a school in Liberia. Because the
Woman’s Era Club might have sent a younger delegate and did not, it is
probable that the women realized that the cause was already lost.

After the convention, the club heard a report from a white woman who
attended, Kate Lyon Brown of Waltham. Boston black community leaders
were present, as were NACW president Mary Church Terrell, and Woman’s
Era leaders Agnes Adams and Eliza Gardner. Ruffin was absent. Brown,
apparently an outsider in the Massachusetts delegation, decided on her own
to present the black women’s case at Los Angeles. On the train ride across
country, she discovered to her surprise that sentiment among the Massachu¬
setts women had shifted. Sometime prior to the convention, they accepted
a “compromise” loaded in the South’s favor. State federations could admit
whomever they wished, but the national committee on membership must
return a unanimous ruling to accept an applicant, thus assuring the rejection
of African-American clubs. The Massachusetts delegates en route to Los
Angeles felt the question was closed. Brown was ruled out of order when she
tried to argue the point on the convention floor, and the Massachusetts
women did not protest. 50

Ruffin lived until 1924 and participated in other civic associations. The last
extant issue of the Womans Era is January 1897; it is not clear how long the
newspaper or the club actually lasted. Besides the school in Liberia, Ruffin
also sponsored a school in Georgia. Along with Maria Baldwin she helped
organize a group during World War I that later became the League of
Women for Community Service. A rivalry of obscure origin with Butler and
Mary Wilson limited her participation in the NAACP, although she allowed
her name to be associated with it. 51

Just before the 1920 suffrage victory, African-American women, led by
women of Massachusetts, attempted to integrate the NAWSA. Within the
NACW, there was a separate Northeastern Federation of Women’s Clubs
that was formed after the 1899 Chicago convention. This group reflected the
feeling by New England and New York women that the more conservative
Terrell and Fannie Barrier Williams had accrued too much power; rather than
split the organization they adopted a separate structure but remained within
the NACW framework. In 1919 the Northeastern Federation, led by Eliza¬
beth Carter of New Bedford, a longtime ally of Ruffin’s, applied to the
NAWSA for membership. Ida Husted Harper of NAWSA urged the Afri¬
can-American women to withdraw their request so as not to antagonize

The Legacy of Lucy Stone 103

needed southern congressional support for the suffrage amendment. If the
Northeastern Federation would wait until the amendment passed, then there
might be a favorable response to their request, she wrote. Of course, once
the amendment passed NAWSA would no longer have any reason to exist.
Apparently the Northeastern Federation did not press its case. This final act
in the drama of the relation between the races in the suffrage movement
owed much to the lifework of Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin . 52

MARIA L. BALDWIN: A LIFE OF SERVICE

If Ruffin was the central organizer of the African-American women's clubs,
her friend and colleague Maria L. Baldwin personified the life of service to
which the clubs were dedicated. A more retiring person than her controversial
colleague, Baldwin was a universally admired educator who moved easily in
both black and white circles. She accomplished in her career what Ruffin
tried to win for a wider layer of African-American women: integration into
American society and the opportunity for advancement based on merit. Her
personal professional success gave the lie to race-based discrimination in the
professions and public life in general.

Baldwin (1856-1922) lived almost her entire life in Boston and Cambridge.
Her father was a Haitian immigrant who worked as a letter carrier; little is
known about her mother. She attended the Cambridge public schools, and
rose from grade school teacher to become principal in 1889 and master of the
Agassiz school in that city in 1915. The student body was 98 percent white
and many students were the children of Harvard professors. This unusual
situation—being an African-American master of an overwhelmingly white
school—won Baldwin national attention and contributed to the perception
of the Boston area as a region of advanced racial views. Her position as a
schoolmaster also won her the friendship and respect of Boston's genteel
reformers. These included men who supported Booker Washington's per¬
spective, such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Edward Everett Hale, and
Harvard President Charles W. Eliot. A suffragist, she counted as female
friends Ednah D. Cheney and Julia Ward Howe. Because of her work, she
was probably better connected in white society than any other Boston Afri¬
can-American of her time.

Throughout her life she participated in the African-American communi¬
ty’s civic affairs, apparently without taking sides in the ideological disputes.
She joined the Banneker Club, a literary discussion group organized in 1874,
that included her friend Archibald Grimke. Like Ruffin, she later organized
her own discussion group, which W. E. B. Du Bois attended in 1885. “It was

104 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

a sort of a salon, unnamed, unorganized, but palpitating with spirit,” he re¬
called upon her death. Along with Ruffin, she helped to initiate the Woman’s
Era Club. She served on the board of the Robert Gould Shaw settlement
house, which aided southern migrants, and during World War I she orga¬
nized a service group for African-American soldiers that later became the
League for Community Service. 53

Like Archibald Grimke, Baldwin straddled the divide between militant
and accommodationist camps, but her associations suggest that she may have
been more comfortable with the latter. Her only published works are two very
brief essays, one that appeared in the Hampton College magazine, Southern
Workman , and the other in the NAACP journal, the Crisis. The Hampton
piece appeared in 1900 in the midst of deteriorating race relations in the
South; in keeping with that journal’s orientation, her article was appropriately
vague and philosophical, demonstrating a determined optimism about a fu¬
ture that proved to be increasingly bleak. The 1915 Crisis essay endorsed wom¬
en’s suffrage in a few paragraphs. 54

Archibald Grimke wrote two columns about her as Boston correspondent
for the New York Age in December 1905, at a time when the Age was blasting
away editorially at the militant Niagara movement. Grimke’s biographer sug¬
gests that he used the pro-Washington newspaper to undermine the Tuske-
gean’s ideas, which may be true; Grimke broke with Washington less than a
year later. The use to which he put Baldwin’s career does suggest a subversive
intent in regard to the Bookerite paradigm. Grimke extolled Baldwin’s char¬
acter, personality, and perseverance and held up her career as a model for
young people. “About herself as a pedagogue there is an atmosphere of breed¬
ing, the fine manner of a lady,” he wrote. She was easily the most popular
teacher at the Hampton Institute 1899 summer school, he recalled, yet she
maintained an attitude of modesty. Nevertheless, these eminently respectable
qualities were repaid with insult when some southern women took up lodg¬
ings in Boston’s Franklin House, where Baldwin also lived. The southerners
prevailed upon the management to evict Baldwin; the managers refused;
whereupon the southerners left in a huff. Grimke contrasted Baldwin’s digni¬
fied and steadfast behavior through this episode to that of another resident
who was “passing” for white, and refused to come to Baldwin’s defense. Bald¬
win’s resistance to the southerners, albeit on northern soil, showed the impor¬
tance of standing up for one’s rights. 55

Baldwin did keep her distance from Washington’s critics. Association with
Monroe Trotter would have been deleterious to her career, and she seems to
have avoided the fiery editor. African-American women did on occasion ap¬
pear as speakers at Trotter-sponsored events, but not the prominent Baldwin.

The Legacy of Lucy Stone 105

There is no evidence of her reaction to the 1903 Boston “riot” but it is difficult
to imagine approving of the angry confrontation that Trotter instigated. She
did speak at the 1905 centennial celebration of the birth of William Lloyd
Garrison, but at the meeting sponsored by the moderate defenders of civil
rights. Despite her friendship with Grimke, who later became the president
of the Washington, D.C., NAACP, Baldwin did not contribute much to the
Boston chapter. In this she probably followed the lead of Ruffin. 56

It is not clear when the Woman’s Era Club dissolved. Its successor was the
League of Women for Community Service that Baldwin led from its origina¬
tion in 1918 until her death four years later. Mrs. George W. Forbes, Mrs.
George Lewis, Florida Ruffin Ridley, and Agnes Adams, some of whom
were Women’s Era veterans, helped with the new group. This began as the
wartime Soldiers’ Comfort Unit, which planned entertainment and brought
food and clothing to African-American soldiers stationed at nearby Fort De-
vens. Half a year after the Armistice, the group changed its mission to doing
social work with young women and girls, and changed its name. The group
heard a speaker from the newly formed Urban League, whose settlement-
house orientation eschewed civil rights agitation in favor of self-improve¬
ment. Baldwin’s group replicated the work of the Women’s Service Club,
founded by Mary Wilson of the NAACP, which taught girls sewing and
brought food baskets to the needy. The existence of these two separate groups
serving remarkably similar needs suggests the persistence of an old rivalry
whose original significance was probably transcended by 1920. 57

Baldwin supported women’s suffrage but devoted little time to it. Her
1915 contribution to the Crisis roundtable is titled “Votes for Teachers” and
celebrates the contributions to society of her fellow teachers while offering
little on the natural rights of women as citizens. Her tone is pensive and
hopeful that her colleagues will use their ballots wisely if allowed to vote.
“One is warranted in thinking that teachers will transfer to their use of the
ballot their habit of fidelity to ideals,” she concluded. Although her friends
and acquaintances included suffragists, she herself had other priorities. 58

According to the Boston Evening Transcript , Baldwin was “one of the most
prominent colored women in the United States” at the time of her death.
She expired dramatically, collapsing after a speech to the board of the Robert
Gould Shaw House. A well-attended funeral service at the Arlington Street
Church attracted mourners from her numerous civic and professional associa¬
tions. Her pallbearers included four white men from the philanthropic and
social-work fields, and four prominent African-Americans, among them
Booker Washington’s friend from Hampton days, Samuel Courtney, and the
NAACP’s Clement Morgan . 59

io6 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

Although Baldwin did not play a prominent role in the fight for civil rights
or women’s suffrage, her quiet life of accomplishment refuted the arguments
of racists and sexists. At a time when white male theorists were generating
ideas of hereditary Anglo-Saxon supremacy, her example suggested to thou¬
sands of students that those ideas might be flawed. By serving so prominently
in the African-American and white worlds, she fulfilled in her life the goals
articulated by her friend Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin when she founded the
Women’s Era Club and demanded to be seated as an equal among the white
clubwomen.

FOUR

William Monroe Trotter

Bostonian

William Monroe Trotter was above all else a product of the Boston racial
environment: he was born, raised, educated, and married there and rarely left.
Intellectually he descended from various strands of abolitionist thought, but
he devised his own strategy to win equality for African-Americans during the
high tide of white racism. Because the National Association for the Advance¬
ment of Colored People had a more appropriate method for winning full
legal equality, and perhaps because he never wrote a book, Trotter’s impor¬
tance within national African-American politics is sometimes overlooked. He
is best known for the 1903 meeting at which he challenged Booker Washing¬
ton, the “Boston Riot”; and in a certain sense he can be seen as the bridge
over which W. E. B. Du Bois passed to the founding of the Niagara move¬
ment. In Boston he was the central leader of the African-American commu¬
nity from 1904 to about 1915, and is perhaps the single most important figure
in all of Boston’s African-American history.

Trotter’s father James was born a slave in Mississippi. His family arrived
in Cincinnati around 1854 (whether by escape or manumission is not clear)
and the free James Monroe Trotter joined the 55th Massachusetts Civil War
regiment, serving under N. P. Hallowell and George Garrison, son of Wil¬
liam Lloyd Garrison. As a soldier, James Trotter was a leader in the fight for
equal pay for African-American troops. After the war he moved to Boston.
Virginia Isaacs Trotter, William Monroe’s mother, returned to Ohio for
health reasons in 1872 to deliver her only son. Two daughters, Maude and
Bessie, were born later. The elder Trotter worked at the post office, and
after suffering racial discrimination at the hands of the Republican patronage
machine, he turned to the Democrats. During the first Grover Cleveland
administration, he rose to the highest appointed post open to African-Ameri-

no Boston Confronts Jim Crow

cans, recorder of deeds in Washington, D.C. At the end of Cleveland's first
term, James Trotter returned to Boston and began a prosperous real estate
business. 1

William Monroe Trotter was an outstanding student, popular with his
classmates in the mostly white Hyde Park section, and possessed of a strong
religious inclination that he exercised in an integrated Baptist church. Trotter
attended Harvard, where he won scholarships and was the first African-
American elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He cheered the athletic teams enthusi¬
astically, joined the Wendell Phillips Club, and was president of the Total
Abstinence League. He took a wide range of courses, studying with teachers
Francis Peabody, Edward Cummings, Albert Bushnell Hart, and Oswald
Garrison Villard. He graduated magna cum laude in 1895, having had a posi¬
tive and happy experience. 2

Trotter took a succession of jobs after college, planning to enter his late
father’s business. In 1899 he married Geraldine Pindell, whose uncle had
participated in the movement to desegregate the Boston public schools in
the 1850s; they were happily married and Geraldine was her husband’s main
collaborator on the newspaper they would help to found, the Guardian , until
her death in 1918. The Trotters joined social clubs and helped to organize the
Boston Literary and Historical Association in 1901. Trotter’s correspondence
with his white classmate John A. Fairlie shows much of his sensibility around
this time. He writes somewhat condescendingly of playing tennis with his
country cousins in Ohio on their large farm. After graduation he eagerly
sought tickets for Harvard football games and attended reunions with his
white friends. Joining a white real estate firm in 1899 Trotter prospered and
acquired various properties in his own name. His sister Maude was married
in 1907 to Dr. Charles G. Steward, son of Chaplain Theophilus Steward of
the 25th Infantry. According to the Boston Herald, “The bride wore a gown
of imported embroidered Swiss en train”; the leading lights of Boston’s black
upper class brought expensive gifts. 3 Trotter inherited culture, wealth, and
racial pride.

Yet, Trotter sensed the contradictary nature of his situation. On the one
hand, he was born into comfort, was blessed with remarkable gifts of intelli¬
gence and self-discipline, had married a woman of similar temperament, and
had a promising financial career. On the other hand, he was conscious of the
prejudice he faced at home and of the national deterioration of race relations
that grew increasingly more ominous. Offered a job as a teacher in Washing¬
ton, D.C., after graduation, Trotter declined, explaining to Fairlie his prefer¬
ence for a business career, but protesting also that “the place is too far South
and the school a separate one.” He recognized that there would be obstacles

William Monroe Trotter hi

in business as well: “I should prefer to take my chances in an established firm
but there is in the way of high preferment for me one large impediment that
other men do not have to hinder them.” 4

As Stephen R. Fox accurately observes in his biography of Trotter, the
combination of renascent racism nationally, the influences of his father, Har¬
vard, and the militant group among the Boston elite pushed Trotter in the
direction of political activism. Along with William H. Scott, a minister from
nearby Woburn, and George W. Forbes, a writer who worked at the public
library, Trotter participated in the Massachusetts Racial Protective Associa¬
tion. In his first address before this group, he spoke against the policies of
Booker Washington. With these new friends, he began to publish the Boston
Guardian , whose first issue appeared 9 November 1901. 5

This truncated summary of Trotter’s early career may be usefully compared
and contrasted to that of the preeminent leader of the protest tradition, Trot¬
ter’s brief ally and later antagonist, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. Like
Trotter, Du Bois was gifted, Massachusetts-born, exposed to white playmates
as a boy, and educated at Harvard. Du Bois had even courted Geraldine
Pindell. Du Bois, however, as he later revealed in several striking literary
passages, was earlier troubled by “the veil” drawn by whites against Negroes,
and he grappled more intensely with the problem of the “duality” of the
African-American identity. Unlike Trotter, he was not born a Bostonian, nor
to a father well-connected to the white world. Unlike Trotter, he made his
way south to study at Fisk and teach in isolated rural schools, and later at
Atlanta University. He admired Booker Washington throughout his forma¬
tive years. Four years Trotter’s senior, he did not publicly break with Wash¬
ington until 1903, with the thoughtful volume, The Souls of Black Folk . 6

Du Bois’s early career, with a rich experience of the North and South,
allowed him a better appreciation of the national relation of forces between
black and white. A key to Trotter’s political outlook is that he apparently
never set foot in the states of the Confederacy. Although the Guardian re¬
ported every lynching, Jim Crow law, disfranchisement measure, and racist
utterance by southern white politicians, it necessarily recorded these develop¬
ments by clipping the national press. In a sense, Trotter was covering a for¬
eign country. Welcoming conventioneers to his National Independent
Political League’s Boston meeting in August 1911, the Guardian banner en¬
thused, “Welcome to the Home of Abolition,” a place “where it is no crime
to be black.” Trotter urged his guests to “breathe Boston air, spend a short
time in its atmosphere, and you will be proud that you are an American
citizen.” 7 No doubt, a visit to the many shrines honoring the abolitionist
heroes could be inspiring. Conversely, exclusive respiration of such a rarefied

ii2 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

atmosphere could be limiting. After Trotters second confrontation with
President Woodrow Wilson in 1915, he made a midwestern speaking tour,
organized by his ally Ida B. Wells-Barnett. “I thought that he needed to get
out in this part of the country and see that the world didn’t revolve around
Boston as a hub,” Wells-Barnett noted. 8

If Trotter lived in a rapidly changing and increasingly multinational Bos¬
ton, his imagination was rooted in its abolitionist past. African-Americans
nationally regarded Boston with special reverence; even Booker Washington
celebrated the abolitionists as heroes. Trotter esteemed the lives of the aboli¬
tionists as a rebuke to the commercial spirit of his own age. He sponsored
commemorations of their centennials in an almost religious spirit. As the
leader of the Boston militants, he was keeper of the flame, a secular priest in
a holy city.

Trotter borrowed from the distinct strands of the antislavery impulse. Very
early he fashioned his own strategy to win civil rights. He never wrote a book
or even a pamphlet, but his metier was the editorial and the indignation
meeting. As Fox notes, Trotter was the only African-American editor to
make a lifelong career of producing a weekly newspaper and leading a na¬
tional protest group. In this choice of career, William Lloyd Garrison was
the obvious role model. 9

Ultimately he drove away every strong-willed person with whom he collab¬
orated. “You are finding that it is impossible to work permanently with Mr.
Trotter, unless he does the commanding; he is not well balanced enough. . . .
He is a splendid fellow in many ways: self-sacrificing and honest, at the same
time we cannot afford to let him go ahead and have his own way.” 10 Thus
Du Bois advised Bishop Alexander Walters of New York, who was then
working with Trotter to establish the Negro-American Political League
(NAPL). One need not adduce the many harsh judgments of him by his
opponents to establish this case. He should have been able to treat with
respect militants like Clement Morgan or Butler Wilson with whom he dis¬
agreed. This was his tragic flaw: a sectarianism that personalized even tactical
political disagreements.

AN INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS

From men like his father, and the editor Timothy Thomas Fortune, he
adopted a stance of political independence. Exercise of the suffrage was the
linchpin of Trotter’s strategy, and the names of his various organizations re¬
flected this: New England Suffrage League, Negro-American Political
League, National Independent Political League. On the national level, Trot-

William Monroe Trotter 113

ter supported Theodore Roosevelt with reservations in 1904 (the reservation
being that he dump Booker Washington as political adviser). In 1908, the
Guardian campaigned for Ohio Republican Joseph Benjamin Foraker, then
fell just short of endorsing Democrat William Jennings Bryan after the Re¬
publican convention. After his 1912 endorsement of Woodrow Wilson, Trot¬
ter returned to the Republicans in 1916 and 1920. 11 This particular electoral
peregrination was not entirely unique in that all Progressive Era presidents
betrayed preelection promises to African-Americans, causing some uncer¬
tainty about traditional Republican loyalty. What made Trotter unusual,
however, was that he elevated these tactical choices to the level of principle.
“Any [Secretary of War William Howard] Taft Negro Is Blood Guilty of
Disfranchisement by Taft's Own Speeches,” a 1908 Guardian headline de¬
clared, and beneath it, “The Race Traitor’s Column” named names. 12

Trotter’s electoral strategy overestimated the race’s power to win its de¬
mands through the ballot. “Can Control Presidency,” a May 1904 Guardian
headline declared. “Negroes of North Hold Balance of Power in Next Presi¬
dential Election Says New York Sun . . . Chance to Force Demands.” The
Sun article included a table showing the margin of Republican victory in
1900 in California, Connecticut, Indiana, New York, and New Jersey, and
contrasted it to the eligible African-American electorate in those states. If
these voters threatened to bolt and vote Democratic, the Republicans would
have no choice but to act on the civil rights agenda. By and large, African-
American voters stayed with the Republicans throughout this period, shifting
only during the 1910 midterm election, along with the white electorate. How¬
ever, it is unlikely that the electoral card could have been played with much
effect on a national level by the nation’s small number of enfranchised north¬
ern African-Americans. Not until the 1920s did black voters figure into the
plans of some big-city machines, and Boston, with its small community, was
not one of these. 13

This strategy was made more strict by Trotter’s corollary belief that no
member of his organization could hold a responsible position in a political
party. For this reason, Trotter demanded that Virginia’s James H. Hayes
resign the presidency of the National Negro Suffrage League in 1904, because
he was a member of the Republican national convention. 14 By this logic,
Trotter would have banned from membership his father, a Democratic of¬
ficeholder, or Frederick Douglass. This early dispute with Hayes was a Ro¬
setta stone that explained the pattern of Trotter’s career. The important
turning point in Trotter’s life was his disruption of the Massachusetts branch
of the Niagara movement in 1907. This was the national movement founded
by Du Bois that stood for the full civil rights agenda. Trotter had no impor-

ii4 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

tant political differences with Du Bois or Clement G. Morgan, his rival for
Massachusetts leadership, yet he clashed with them over minor issues. Trotter
and Morgan were among the six New England founding members of Niagara
in 1905 and had been closely allied since the Boston Riot of July 1903, after
which Morgan represented Trotter in court. In July 1906, Trotter argued with
Morgan, who was a good friend of Du Bois, over several issues. He opposed
the admission of women to the Niagara movement, in particular Maria Bald¬
win and Mrs. Archibald Grimke. He distorted a Morgan speech that was
printed in the Guardian. Finally, Trotter opposed the reelection of Massachu¬
setts Governor Curtis Guild, whom Morgan supported. 15

Du Bois traveled to Boston in February 1906 and June 1907 to try to recon¬
cile the two men. Trotter agreed to work harmoniously with Morgan and
then fired off a letter full of recrimination as soon as Du Bois returned to
Atlanta in 1907. In June, the Boston group organized a fundraising play for a
challenge to a Virginia Jim Crow law. George Forbes, a Guardian founder
who broke with Trotter under pressure from Booker Washington, worked
energetically on the play. To this Trotter also objected. He and his supporters
did not help organize the Niagara movement’s 1907 meeting in Boston, but
Forbes and his wife did. 16

The Guardian did promote that convention, but with its own particular
slant. Trotter ran larger articles boosting his favorite local Republican, Sena¬
tor Winthrop Murray Crane, and bashing Morgan’s favorite, Curtis Guild,
who had urged the Massachusetts legislature to fund the segregated James¬
town, Virginia, tercentenary exposition. Eight hundred people attended the
public meeting, over which Du Bois presided. It was addressed by Niagara
movement stalwarts like New Haven attorney George W. Crawford, the
Baptist Reverend Dr. Charles S. Morris of New York, and New York school
principal William L. Bulkeley. Trotter and his allies, except the nonsectarian
Reverdy Ransom, were notably absent from the speakers’ list. 17

In the aftermath of the convention, Du Bois attempted to address further
organizational questions raised by Trotter. Trotter charged that nonmembers
of the movement had voted for officers and the election was thus invalid. Du
Bois staged another election in Massachusetts and tried to establish who
was actually on the membership rolls. In Du Bois’s opinion, an exceedingly
scrupulous election was then held; the Forbeses and Grimkes were accepted
as associate members, and remaining matters in dispute were to be laid before
the executive committee. Du Bois concluded: “Is this movement a great
movement which invites co-operation from all the race or is it a small clique
which is using the movement to settle personal debts and its petty animosi¬
ties? . . . Finally, I regret to say that while no one has defended Mr. Trotter

William Monroe Trotter 115

more than I have or believes more than I do in the worth of his work and the
great sacrifices that he has made, nevertheless I am reluctantly compelled to
believe that Mr. Trotter is a burden to the Niagara Movement at present.” 18
Trotter never worked with Du Bois again, and he went on to build the Negro-
American Political League with New York’s Bishop Alexander Walters and
J. Milton Waldron of Washington, D.C., as allies. Trotter had allowed a
series of minor tactical questions to separate himself from Du Bois, who
adroitly identified the underlying conceptual differences between the two ap¬
proaches. Trotter had never been wholly loyal to Niagara anyway, keeping his
Suffrage League going during Niagara’s tenuous existence.

Working from his Boston base and armed with the Guardian, Trotter sim¬
ply saw himself as the center of the national movement. A few months after
the Niagara movement left town in 1907, Trotter organized a centennial cele¬
bration in honor of the martyred abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy. Twelve hundred
people came to Faneuil Hall to press for a congressional resolution outlawing
the Jim Crow railroad car in interstate travel. William Lloyd Garrison Jr. and
future NAACP leader Mary White Ovington spoke, Trotter read a bill drawn
up by Albert E. Pillsbury, and Moorfield Storey and Thomas Wentworth
Higginson sent letters of support. The meeting was held under the auspices
of the New England Suffrage League without a mention of Clement Morgan
or the Niagara movement; by any measure the meeting was a success. Trotter
was back at Faneuil Hall in March 1908 with a meeting of equal size, this
time threatening to bolt the Republican Party if Secretary of War William
Howard Taft was the nominee. The long list of speakers comprised African-
American ministers, some attorneys, and Trotter. 19

This meeting provided the momentum for a Philadelphia conference that
founded the Negro-American Political League in April 1908. Trotter por¬
trayed this event as a complete vindication, claiming a total of four thousand
participants at two rallies. One article described in vivid detail an enthusiastic
gathering of two thousand that overflowed the packed church. William H.
Scott, Trotter, and Bishop Walters presided, and Trotter ally Reverend Byron
Gunner, now of Hillburn, New York; nominal chairman J. Milton Waldron;
and James Hayes of the Suffrage League delivered the speeches. The new
organization pledged itself above all to prevent the nomination of Roosevelt
or Taft. 20

Walters was nervous about the convention before it began and appealed to
Du Bois to come to Philadelphia to counter Trotter’s influence: “As I told
you before, the initiative for the Philadelphia meeting was taken by Messrs.
Trotter and Scott and not by myself, I joined in with them with the hope
that we might be able to unite all the forces, but I have since discovered that

n6 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

it is utterly impossible to work with Mr. Trotter.” Du Bois was through with
Trotter and would not come. In the aftermath, both were disconcerted by the
convention’s outcome. “The convention was a success, in point of numbers
and as a sentiment maker: the personnel of the convention was quite repre¬
sentative at least enough so as to disarm the ridicule which the [conservative]
New York Age had prepared in advance to give it. Hundreds were turned
away at the door each evening,” Walters reported. Du Bois observed that the
convention had simply built a rival organization, further fracturing the race
to no apparent purpose. 21

Trotter fought with Niagara’s more potent successor, the NAACP, when
after a scheduling mix-up Trotter and the association’s Clement Morgan
planned separate centennial celebrations for Charles Sumner. The New York
office urged Morgan to cancel his meeting but Morgan persisted. Trotter
organized a series of meetings on 5 and 6 January 1911, under the auspices of
the New England Suffrage League in cooperation with the National Inde¬
pendent Political League, succesor to the NAPL. Five years after the
Brownsville incident of 1906, when President Theodore Roosevelt summarily
discharged a battallion of African-American soldiers, Trotter was relentlessly
firing away at Roosevelt’s faction in the Republican Party. Trotter’s evening
meetings drew a combined total of 2,200, and were addressed by Democratic
Governor Eugene N. Foss; Albert E. Pillsbury; Mayor John F. Fitzgerald;
George Downing, the son of an African-American friend of Sumner’s; Pro¬
fessor Charles Zueblein; Dr. A. A. Berle, a Methodist bishop; and a host of
African-American ministers headed by Reverdy Ransom. Governor Foss
struck the partisan theme that Trotter desired: Charles Sumner’s successor in
the Senate, Henry Cabot Lodge (a Roosevelt man) was unworthy of his
predecessor. There were daytime celebrations as well, and Trotter had reason
to be pleased with the outcome. 22

Morgan, on the other hand, stumbled badly. His featured speaker was ex¬
governor Curtis Guild, who painted an unflattering portrait of Sumner before
a mostly African-American audience. Abolitionist veteran Frank Sanborn
and African-American civil rights lawyer Butler Wilson answered Guild from
the rostrum. Trotter turned this tense encounter into grist for his vengeful
mill, pointing out in his paper that Lodge himself had been invited to speak;
that Lodge’s agent had paid for the hall rental; and that some endorsers of
the meeting had had their names used without being notified. Trotter covered
the NAACP’s New York commemoration favorably, but in Boston the dam¬
age to the community’s unity was serious. 23

This sequence of events from 1905 to 1910 reveals much about Trotter’s
national strategy and his self-perception. Simply put, Trotter conceived him-

William Monroe Trotter 117

self to be at center stage in the North, and he was not entirely without reason.
It was he who had challenged Booker Washington in 1901 and set in motion
the train of events that led to the Niagara League. He had built large public
protests in Philadelphia and Boston, and had allies in Washington and New
York. As a Bostonian, Trotter had access to a tradition that New Yorkers or
Atlantans, despite the size of those communities, could not match. By mobi¬
lizing militant sentiment, it is not surprising that he could challenge Du Bois
and regard himself as the real leader of the movement.

Trotter boldly called for protest meetings because he believed that mass
action inspired people. Although he stressed the value of suffrage, he never
argued that electoral politics was sufficient by itself to effect full equality.
Like Garrison and Douglass, he was an activist who thrived on indignation
meetings to rouse the conscience of the nation. Almost as a counterpoint to
this approach, Trotter showed very little interest in legal challenges or legisla¬
tive maneuvering to win the day. There is little coverage in the Guardian
of lawsuits. By contrast, Butler Wilson and Clement Morgan, the African-
American leaders of the Boston NAACP, were both attorneys. Trotter did
have legal allies: Edgar Benjamin and Emery T. Morris were the outstanding
ones, but his chief Boston supporters tended to be ministers. As we shall see
in more detail later, Trotter was deeply rooted in Boston’s black community
and its antislavery tradition.

With this understanding, it is easier to appreciate how Trotter misjudged
the potential of the NAACP when it appeared in the 1909-11 period. Trotter
attended the New York meeting that presaged the NAACP and he contrib¬
uted rancorously to the debate over the platform. He advocated adding a
phrase on Jim Crow transportation, and more explicit language on lynching,
but displayed a skeptical attitude. He was not among the twelve African-
Americans on the original Committee of Forty that came out of the meeting.
Toward the NAACP nationally he was wary. When the association’s 1911
meeting was scheduled for Boston, the Guardian welcomed it as a white civil
rights organization that colored people should support. 24

Trotter pointed with local pride to the prominence of Bostonians in the
association such as Moorfield Storey, Albert Pillsbury, Maria Baldwin, Fran¬
cis Jackson Garrison, Horace Bumstead, Archibald Grimke, and, nominally,
himself. He editorialized that “such a movement has great power, at least in
means, brains, and influence. Its effectiveness depends on the principles the
movement espouses, its consistency and the number of white Americans it
can win to its program.” He urged his readers to participate and help give
direction. “This is the home of abolition, of equal rights. It leads in these
principles the rest of the country. Reaction is setting in. Any compromise in

n8 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

Boston will doubly damage the cause. . . . Let's all attend." Eight hundred
people came, and Trotter praised the harmonious atmosphere. In a significant
editorial, titled “A Great, Important Movement,” Trotter regretted that asso¬
ciation leader Moorfield Storey had a kind word for Booker Washington and
feared that “the wide open door policy of membership pursued has its dan¬
gers.” However, “we should all wish it success and take part in making it of
great benefit to race and country.” 25

Trotter rejected his own advice. As soon as the delegates left town, he
announced plans for the convention of the National Independent Political
League (NIPL; successor to the Negro-American Political League), to be
held in Boston in August. His colleagues in this endeavor included Bishop
Walters, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and local supporters the Reverend M. A. N.
Shaw, Emery Morris, I. D. Barnett, M. Cravath Simpson, and writer Pauline
Hopkins. Trotter saw two civil rights organizations: a colored one that he
led, and a white one. As Fox suggests, a combination of Trotters belief in the
need for a black-led group, and his own inability to work in a team with
equals kept him away from the NAACP. 26

One further dimension of great import also separated the NAACP from
the NIPL: their programs. The NAACP was a response not only to the
resurgence of racism, but also to the burgeoning progressive reform move¬
ments of the day. The white association leaders in particular were concerned
about the lack of interest in the Negro shown by Progressives, but they also
were influenced by the nonpartisan spirit of the reformers. The association
itself did not endorse candidates and adopted “pressure group” tactics. White
and middle-class in leadership, its tone was earnest but reasoned, rather than
militant. The very topic of the 1911 conference, “Race Discrimination: Its
Relation to Segregation, Peonage, Violations of Property and Labor Rights,
and Its Ultimate Results,” sounded like the title of an academic paper. Its
plan of work for 1911 was to study Negro schools, organize a national legal
redress committee, establish a bureau of information, publish the Crisis , hold
mass meetings, form local groups, campaign to reapportion Congress, study
national aid to education, and make foreign propaganda. While there existed
varying points of view about membership and organization, the association
aimed to be broadly based and racially integrated. 27

The National Independent Political League, by contrast, planned to partic¬
ipate in the elections as the main part of its strategy. Condemning both
parties, it resolved to “vote only for congressmen and other candidates for
office who pledge themselves to advocate the following measures,” including
opposition to disfranchisement, peonage, Jim Crow cars, and support for
equal education, national legislation against lynching, and the restoration of

William Monroe Trotter 119

the discharged Brownsville soldiers. If the NIPL’s agenda overlapped some¬
what with the association's, it did have a different focus. Notably absent from
its plans was legal defense or initiative. This may have been for lack of funds,
or because Trotter felt the legal field was best left to the more high-powered
and mostly white lawyers in the NAACP’s camp. 28

During the year, Guardian reports on Boston branch meetings of the NIPL
showed the organization’s concerns. The national convention would “advise
the race as to the position it should take in the presidential campaign of 1912
and lay plans for the enfranchisement of our people in states where they are
disfranchised.” At an August meeting in Boston, New Yorker A. W. Whaley
described a black revolt in the Republican Party when African-American
applicants for clerkships were turned down. Only when the applicants threat¬
ened to vote for the Democrats did they get their jobs. The implication for
national political strategy was clear. African-Americans had to play off one
party against the other. 29

The August 1911 NIPL convention was poorly attended and had a narrow
speakers’ list. Not even the outrage over a Coatesville, Pennsylvania, lynching
could swell the delegate size to over 150. Out-of-town orators included Wal¬
dron, Walters, S. L. Carrothers, and old ally Byron Gunner. The local speak¬
ers were Edward Everett Brown, representing Mayor John F. Fitzgerald;
Albert Pillsbury; and Frank Sanborn. J. R. Clifford, an editor from West
Virginia, was elected president. This weak showing revealed that the initia¬
tive had passed to the NAACP. 30

These two national gatherings, both held in Boston and separated by half
a year, may be seen as turning points in the relation between the two groups.
Over the next few years, the counterposed strategies of the NIPL and the
NAACP would be tested in practice. The failure of Trotter’s organization
cannot be traced simply to his difficult personality, although that was a factor.
Certainly, Trotter was overmatched by the wealth and access to power that
the white leaders of the NAACP possessed. However, over the next dec¬
ade, African-Americans would flood into the NAACP and take its leader¬
ship, bypassing Trotter. The main problem was that Trotter’s strategy led to
a dead end.

The NIPL emerged from its desultory 1911 convention and wound up ar¬
guing for Taft against Roosevelt during the Republican campaign. This was
the same Taft whose supporters Trotter characterized as race traitors in 1908,
and the same Taft that Republican loyalist Booker T. Washington was back¬
ing. When Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party after the Republican con¬
vention, some civil rights leaders favored Roosevelt. Among those was J. R.
Clifford, president of the NIPL. At a July 1912 meeting, therefore, the NIPL

i2o Boston Confronts Jim Crow

split. While individual NAACP leaders made their own presidential choices
in 1912, the nonpartisan organization did not divide. Trotter, leading one of
two groups claiming to be the NIPL, now turned to Democratic presidential
candidate Woodrow Wilson. While the NAACP moved forward, the NIPL
fragmented over which white presidential candidate to support. 31

Trotter’s group campaigned seriously for Wilson. One week after the inau¬
guration Trotter wired the new president his congratulations. “As editor of
the Guardian , which alone of the few national Negro newspapers unquali¬
fiedly supported you, as President of the New England Suffrage League
which endorsed you from a racial viewpoint, as corresponding secretary of
the National Independent Political League ... I did my utmost to further
your election among the colored voters. ... I greatly desire to have your
confidence, and to know and be granted the privilege of consultation on your
general policy where we are concerned.” 32

Almost immediately after taking office, President Wilson presided over
the segregation of the federal bureaucracy. His decision affirmed Jim Crow
as federal policy. Trotter organized two delegations to Wilson, in 1913 and
1914, which brought no changes. Their first meeting was formally correct and
Trotter reported it with cautious optimism. In the second meeting Trotter
cut off a presidential monologue defending segregation as a boon to the
Negro. “We didn’t come here as wards of the state,” Trotter interjected. Pro¬
testing that he had been branded as a race traitor for supporting Wilson (the
shoe was now on the other foot), Trotter voiced his disillusionment. “Two
years ago you were thought to be a second Abraham Lincoln,” he lamented.
Wilson was aghast at Trotter’s bold manner, reprimanded him while compli¬
menting the other delegates, and curtailed the interview. Trotter then gave
his version of the supposedly confidential discussion to the press, further
angering Wilson. If ever there was a case of defeat in victory, Trotter’s strat¬
egy had led to precisely that. The great irony of his career was that he wound
up trying to play Booker Washington to Wilson’s Theodore Roosevelt. 33

The effect of Trotter’s second interview upon his notoriety was spectacular.
The story appeared in the leading national newspapers and in some Boston
dailies elbowed aside the news of World War I and the conflict in Mexico.
“President Rebukes Boston Spokesman,” the Boston Globe announced at the
top of page one, placing Trotter’s picture there for probably the first time. 34

Trotter tried to capitalize on his new fame. The National Independent
Equal Rights League (NIERL; successor to the NIPL) organized a midwest-
ern speaking tour for him, during which he addressed sizable audiences.
However, he could not convert these audiences into recruits. Trotter had no
talent for building a national organization. Even if he had, it is not clear what

William Monroe Trotter 121

that organization could now project. The NIERL replaced the NIPL because
the latter organization’s support for Wilson was an embarrassment, but Trot¬
ter never offered a new strategy or acknowledged the failure of the old one.
It should be recalled as well that Wilson was Trotters second presidential
disillusionment. He had backed the winner in 1904 and got Roosevelt and
Brownsville, but this time Trotter was notorious as a former Wilson man. 35

Thus, with no viable strategy to counterpose to the NAACP, toward which
Trotter remained neutral, the remainder of his career consisted of a series of
isolated episodes. He returned from his Midwest tour to campaign against
the film The Birth of a Nation when it opened in Boston. He participated in
a series of local battles against discrimination in alliance with, but separate
from, the NAACP. There was no space on the national stage for two distinct
civil rights groups.

Racial Politics, World War , Labor , and Black Nationalism

The death of Booker T. Washington in 1915, the American entry into World
War I, the development of a northern black working class and the new rise
of nationalism, including black nationalism, presented separate but related
opportunities for Trotter to recast his policies. In all four instances he re¬
mained an isolated individual, going his own way. The death of his beloved
wife and collaborator in 1918 only increased his solitude. Bypassed by larger
events to which he could not respond creatively, Trotter apparently jumped
(he may have simply fallen) to his death in 1934 on his sixty-second birthday. 36

Trotter deliberately stayed away from the summer 1916 Amenia Conference
organized by the NAACP’s Joel Spingarn in the aftermath of Washington’s
death. While the conference produced no new united organization of Book-
erites and militants, it did clear the air and produce a spirit of harmony
among race leaders. Trotter aimed simply to recruit to his own (renamed)
National Equal Rights League, while a diverse group of Tuskegeans and Ni¬
agara men produced joint resolutions and attempted to bury past differences.
In a sense, Trotter lost his reason for being with the death of Washington; it
was opposition to accommodationist policies that had called the Guardian
into print. Now he no longer had his opponent. 37

American entry into the world war provoked a limited opposition by a
small group of African-Americans. By a large majority, race leaders supported
the war effort and hoped that prejudice would be retarded by the enthusiastic
participation of African-Americans in the military. Most leaders agreed to
abjure the struggle during the national emergency. Emmet J. Scott served as
a special assistant to the secretary of war, essentially charged with organizing

122 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

African-American support. Under Du Bois’s editorship, the Crisis agreed
that the special demands of African-Americans could wait. The influential
Chicago Defender and the New York Age led almost the entire African-Ameri¬
can press along this line. 38

Trotter was a reluctant supporter of the war. The Guardian dispelled false
rumors of pro-Germanism among Negroes and avowed the loyalty of the
colored soldier. Unlike other African-American editors, however, he called
for the government to fulfill its part of the bargain and grant civil rights. He
argued that other aggrieved groups pursued a similar policy. On this issue,
Trotters unique Boston location brought him in touch with another influence
that his fellow race leaders did not encounter so directly. “White People
Use War as Chance to Secure Redress and Benefits,” a Guardian headline
announced over a story about Irish-American ambivalence regarding the war.
“English Moved by Reluctance of Irish-Americans to Enlist Here,” ran the
next headline. If there was only a germ of truth in this last pronouncement,
Trotter was not loath to utilize it. In an editorial, he argued that Negro
enlistment should be tied to the demand for justice at home. As the war
effort unfolded, Trotter attacked the separate officer training for colored of¬
ficers that some individual leaders of the NAACP accepted. 39

This reaction to the war might have brought Trotter into sympathetic co¬
operation with either those NAACP leaders who opposed the war, or the
new young militants like Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph who de¬
clared their opposition in the Messenger. Trotter did sponsor a meeting for
Randolph in Boston and Randolph said he “was the only Negro who had the
guts to join us on the platform.” Trotter had shown some openness to socialist
ideas earlier in his career, having invited an African-American socialist to
address the Boston Literary and Historical Society. Trotter did invite Ran¬
dolph to participate in a delegation to President Calvin Coolidge in 1925.
Unlike Randolph, however, Trotter did not take an interest in the labor
movement. Here again, Trotter was probably influenced by his Boston envi¬
ronment. The number of African-American railroad workers, or white radi¬
cal workers, was too small to attract him, unlike the situation in New York
or Chicago. In addition, Trotter was a Harvard man and Randolph a poor
migrant from Florida who had worked in kitchens and studied at City Col¬
lege. Trotter paid little heed to the labor movement. 40

The last famous episode of Trotter’s career was his heroic, quixotic journey
to Paris for the National Equal Rights League to represent the cause of Afri¬
can-Americans at the 1919 peace conference. The Wilson administration de¬
nied passports to nine NERL representatives but Trotter made his way
overseas under an assumed name as a cook’s assistant. Arriving in Paris ille-

William Monroe Trotter 123

gaily, hungry, penniless, and in rags, he nevertheless deluged the conference
with requests for an audience. Ignored, he published articles in the French
press on the true condition of African-Americans. When he returned to the
United States, he addressed huge audiences in New York and Washington.
Then, irony of ironies, he testified before Henry Cabot Lodge’s Foreign Re¬
lations Committee against the treaty brought home by President Woodrow
Wilson. The Guardian had lambasted Lodge for his defense of the Browns¬
ville dismissals, but Wilson was the bigger enemy now. Again, Trotter was
unable to turn the notoriety of his exploits into a viable organization. This
was Trotter’s last moment of national attention. 41

During the 1917-20 period, Trotter developed a new theme in response to
the nationalism unleashed by the war. He began to see oppression in interna¬
tional perspective, and to understand the similarities among other dispos¬
sessed groups. It was only natural that the ambivalent reaction of Boston’s
Irish-American population to the peace treaty should cause Trotter to do this.
As early as 1915, a representative of the Irish National League began speaking
at his meetings. After the war, the Guardian covered the Irish-American
opposition to the peace terms, pressing the lessons of the Irish struggle on its
own constituency. 42

On the other hand, Trotter was skeptical about Pan-Africanism and black
nationalism. He held to the traditional stance derived from antebellum oppo¬
sition to colonization schemes fostered by whites to banish African-Ameri¬
cans from America. He stressed the Americanism of his people, to whom he
referred as “colored Americans,” “Negroes,” or “Negro-Americans.” In 1911
he answered a Boston Transcript editorial that wondered at the failure of
American Negroes to “civilize” Liberia. He replied that “the colored people
here, some of whose very distant relatives were natives of Africa, are Ameri¬
cans, not Africans, not anything else.” He stayed away from Du Bois’s Pan-
Africanist conference in Paris in 1919. When Marcus Garvey’s Universal
Negro Improvement Association and its “back to Africa” campaign began,
the Guardian publicly and deliberately dropped the term “Negro” from its
columns. 43

Yet, if Trotter was an integrationist, there is a sense in which he could also
be seen as a nationalist. In his insistence upon African-American leadership
of the struggle for equality, he foreshadowed the militant organizations of
the 1950s and 1960s that bypassed the NAACP. Trotter accepted white mem¬
bers of his organization—the Reverend William Brigham was his lone con¬
spicuous white follower—but the leadership was to be in African-American
hands.

124 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

LEADER OF BOSTON S AFRICAN-AMERICAN COMMUNITY

Monroe Trotter played a powerful role on the national stage between 1903
and 1911, when the NAACP began to bypass his political organization. After
that, his national influence was episodic. In Boston, he was the leader of the
community at least through the struggle against The Birth of a Nation in 1915.
Unlike the African-American leaders of the Boston NAACP, he earned his
living in and depended upon the community for support, as subscribers to
and advertisers in his paper. He had crucial backing from the clergy. The
Guardian championed the cause of local African-Americans and reported on
a range of issues important to them. Time and again he built spirited protests
in Boston against the oppression of the race in the South. He participated
vigorously in local politics, hoping to influence white leaders to act on behalf
of the African-American community.

Trotter made an inauspicious start in his relations with the community by
promulgating the confrontation with Booker Washington. In Boston, the
balance of forces between the two camps may be gauged by the audience at
two meetings. Two thousand people came to hear Washington at the AME
Zion Church, but not more than a handful of people took part in the disrup¬
tion. After Trotter’s trial and monthlong confinement, he drew some two
hundred people to a meeting celebrating his release. 44

Regardless of the politics of the two antagonists, it is likely that Trotters
tactics only hurt his cause. He might have attempted a dignified and thought¬
ful critique of Washington’s policy from the floor, in the spirit of Du Bois’s
Souls of Black Folk. Had he tried and failed, he would have shown up the
controlling and repressive side of Washington’s behavior. That he chose to
disrupt the meeting with catcalls showed the difference between him and Du
Bois, who was ignorant of the event before the fact and disapproved of the
tactics afterward. 45

The white Boston press predictably painted Washington as the victim of
an unruly assailant who demonstrated all the emotional qualities of an unsta¬
ble race, which the wise leader was trying to raise up. The day before, Wash¬
ington’s picture appeared in several newspapers that reported his speech at
the nearby Weymouth “Town Day” celebration. Pictured along with the town
fathers, Washington paid homage to a locale that had bravely sent its young
men forth to the Civil War and its young women south to teach during
Reconstruction. 46

This harmonious scene contrasted sharply with the following day’s report
of razors, police, tumult, and arrest among “a people quick in anger,” as the
Globe reporter put it. After a description of the conflict, Washington’s reason-

William Monroe Trotter 125

able speech was reported at length. Urging the Bostonians to learn from
thrifty Italian bootblacks who saved their money to go into business for
themselves, he held up the wealthy tailor J. H. Lewis as “a great example of
what we can do.” Washington even gave an anticlerical twist to this appeal to
the Horatio Alger myth: “If the colored people of Boston owned as many
shoe factories as they owned churches, I suspect that the race in this city
would be advanced immensely.” He reminded his audience that he did not
counterpose higher education to industrial education. According to the Bos¬
ton Globe , Washington received a mighty ovation. 47 Reaction quotations in
the Globe and Boston Herald naturally favored Washington heavily. The Her¬
ald report began: “One of the most disgraceful scenes ever witnessed in Bos¬
ton was the deliberate attempt of a few opponents of Booker T. Washington
to break up the mass meeting.” Edward Everett Brown, an African-American
attorney who was on the platform, probably spoke for a wide sector of the
community when he said, “Before we can gain the respect of the Anglo-
Saxon, we must merit their regard by our own actions.” The Boston Transcript
weighed in with a similar account. 48 This negative press coverage could only
have alarmed and embarrassed black Bostonians, regardless of their opinions
of Washington’s policy of accommodation.

The Washington confrontation also marked a turning point for Trotter in
his relations with neo-abolitionists. The Garrison family turned sharply
against Trotter, with Francis Jackson Garrison communicating his support
immediately to Washington. Others, such as Albert E. Pillsbury, Moorfield
Storey, and Richard P. Hallowell, were working in secret with Washington
on civil rights cases and/or contributing articles to the pro-Washington Col¬
ored American Magazine, 49

Despite this controversial beginning, Trotter took leadership in the com¬
munity for at least the next decade. The Guardian undoubtedly was crucial
to his success. The newspaper functioned as a tribune of the people. While it
focused on national politics, it also covered the Boston scene to the best
abilities of its tiny staff. Sometimes this meant just clipping the Boston press
and inserting hortatory headlines; sometimes the Trotters simply covered the
activities of their own circle. The Guardian denounced police or popular bru¬
tality against colored people, maneuvered in local politics, followed deeper
issues as they were presented to the Boston Literary and Historical Society,
and reported the deeds of outstanding local African-Americans. Like any
small-town editor in search of sales, Trotter printed an enormous number of
names of ordinary people going about their quiet lives.

The Guardian criticized police brutality and racist violence episodically. In
general, the Guardian praised Boston as a model of what the nation should

126 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

be. However, Trotter was cognizant of police brutality and the concomitant
image of the Negro as criminal promoted by the newspapers. The very first
issue ran a small article attacking the Dorchester Beacon , which demanded a
more severe penalty for a colored man who had killed a policeman. The
Guardian pointed out that the policeman was off duty, out of uniform, and
had attacked the man, who proved to be an imbecile. When a Boston patrol¬
man assaulted and arrested an interracial couple, the Guardian demanded
that the officer be disciplined. Years later, the Guardian chastised the police
for failing to pursue several incidents in which white thugs, rumored to be a
gang called “the Forty Thieves,” assaulted colored people. To offset reports
of Negro criminality, the Guardian countered the hypocrisy of white newspa¬
pers by prominently and regularly reprinting reports of white crime with
headlines calling attention to the race of the criminals. 50

In local politics, Trotter campaigned for candidates who promised friendli¬
ness to the race, regardless of party. The Guardian rarely editorialized on
nonracial issues such as the tariff, municipal reform, trust regulation, or for¬
eign policy. This allowed him to support such diverse politicians as Republi¬
can Winthrop Murray Crane, and Democrat John F. Fitzgerald.

Trotter first opposed Crane’s appointment to fill the Senate seat vacated
by the death of anti-imperialist Republican George Frisbee Hoar. With a
touch of condescension, Trotter dismissed Crane “even though he is a great
friend of the race, although he has on occasion disappointed us,” as a poor
orator. When Senator Crane resisted the Roosevelt-Lodge-Taft wing of the
party after the Brownsville incident, Trotter began to champion his cause.
Lodge induced Trotter’s disfavor when he gratuitously criticized the African-
American regiment. Crane worked in the Senate to facilitate an inquiry into
the affair, and Trotter began promoting him for president. He supported
Crane’s reelection by the legislature in 1912, even though Crane had gone
over to the Taft side (which Trotter himself did briefly), explaining that “the
only way to have friends in politics is to establish the fact that you will support
a friend when he is attacked.” If the race turned its back on Crane, “no white
man will ever stand up for us in Congress.” 51

On the Democratic side, John F. Fitzgerald was the municipal candidate
who most consistently sought black votes as a way of tipping the balance in
the factional jungle of party politics. As mayor he did not have to do much
to win Trotter’s favor. At Trotter’s request, Fitzgerald lowered the city flags
to half-staff in commemoration of the poet John Greenleaf Whittier’s cen¬
tennial. He appointed Edward Everett Brown to the highest city post occu¬
pied by an African-American to that date, assistant health commissioner. At
a Faneuil Hall election rally, the highlight of six addressed by the mayor in

William Monroe Trotter 127

one day, Fitzgerald condemned the dismissal of the Brownsville troops. Trot¬
ter was conspicuously absent from a platform that included Brown, who had
testified against him after the Boston Riot, and Archibald H. Grimke, who
was working for Alexanders Magazine. Nevertheless, the Guardian covered
the meeting enthusiastically. When Republican George Hibbard ousted Fitz¬
gerald, the Guardian noted with derision that his first act was to fire Brown. 52
Trotter was generally in the Democratic camp between 1906 and 1914, from
Brownsville to the second Wilson interview.

There is a certain amount of pathos in the energy Trotter extended in these
electoral contests. The stakes for African-Americans were small, and in most
cases merely symbolic. Such traditional patronage boons as jobs in municipal
departments were not even on the agenda in this period. Treatment of Afri¬
can-Americans merited little attention from either politicians or the press.
The very parsimony of the promises of white politicians suggests how coun¬
terproductive it was for Trotter to allow party loyalties to separate him from
Clement Morgan or Butler Wilson, who were steadfast Republicans.

Trotter placed his stamp on the consciousness of the community by acting
as high priest of its secular ritual: the Faneuil Hall indignation meeting. Trot¬
ter himself usually spoke only briefly at these events, which suggests that his
oratorical powers were pale in comparison with the more practiced skills of
the clergy. These meetings were organized thematically around a particular
outrage, electoral opportunity, or centennial observation. Prominent whites
usually spoke along with African-American community leaders to largely
black audiences. The meetings were generally well attended and spirited. The
Guardian would advertise their coming weeks in advance and report them
effusively, while the white press would dutifully record the event on inside
pages.

One typical meeting, held in May 1902, called for the passage of the Crum-
packer Resolution to reduce the congressional representation of those states
that disfranchised African-American voters. A speaker from South Carolina
denounced a recent lynching there. Trotter used the occasion for a factional
attack on Booker Washington. The Reverend William Scott of Woburn,
speaking for the Massachusetts Racial Protective Association, read messages
of support from the Reverend Johnson W. Hill, a Trotter ally; E. D. Crum-
packer of Indiana, sponsor of the resolution; Governor Crane; former gover¬
nor George S. Boutwell; Moorfield Storey; and others. Edward Everett
Brown, Archibald Grimke, Massachusetts Congressman William H. Moody,
and former governor John Quincy Adams Brackett spoke. Edwin B. Jourdain
of New Bedford presented a resolution that called on the administration to

128 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

protect the civil and political rights of Negroes, and asked the colored voters
of Massachusetts to support only candidates who backed the bill. 53

Boutwell and Brackett shared the platform two years later when the Boston
Suffrage League attacked Republican backsliding on Negro suffrage. The
Guardian boasted that it was a “monster mass meeting.” Clement Morgan
was in the chair, and Butler Wilson, the Reverend Francis H. Rowley, and
the Reverend Byron Gunner of Newport, Rhode Island, spoke. This meeting
showed that within a year of the Boston Riot, Trotter had recaptured the
initiative and could still stage significant meetings attracting prominent
speakers and large audiences. 54

In 1905, Trotter celebrated William Lloyd Garrison's centennial, despite
the hostility that he had engendered among the abolitionist's children. The
Bookerites had the upper hand in that Garrison’s descendants were in their
camp. Trotter tried to effect at least a truce, seeking a photo of Garrison pere
from fils Francis Jackson, who extracted a promise of nonsectarianism from
Trotter. “Trotter is inviting [William H.] Lewis to speak as a token of his
non-partisanship,” Francis Garrison reported to his nephew Oswald Garrison
Villard, along with the news of Butler Wilson’s inclination to boycott both
sides. Wilson was to preside over a united meeting on 10 December at the
Joy Street Church, which Garrison decided to address after some hesitation.
The moderate group gathered at the AME Zion Church to hear Fanny Vil¬
lard, Frank Sanborn, Moorfield Storey, Archibald Grimke, James H. Wolff,
the commander of the Massachusetts Grand Army of the Republic (who was
African-American), and a Tuskegee representative. Trotter held ceremonies
at the Garrison gravesite and statue, and at St. Monica's Home for Sick
Colored Women. He sponsored two meetings at Faneuil Hall, which heard
Garrison family members, Boston Transcript editor E. H. Clement, Boston
Herald editor William Allen, and a host of others. Reverdy Ransom was the
keynote speaker, and the Guardian reported all events in glowing terms. 55

These meetings, along with others like the 1907 Elijah Lovejoy and 1911
Sumner celebrations, showed that Trotter had important allies in the African-
American community and could build successful community gatherings.
White supporters of civil rights generally tried not to take sides, and even
after the NAACP’s founding they did not universally disdain Trotter's invita¬
tions to speak. Moorfield Storey, for example, was particularly sensitive to
Trotter’s authority in the black community and urged New York NAACP
leaders in 1911 not to attack him. 56 During the 1915 fight against Birth of a
Nation , Trotter was the one who mobilized the community, while the
NAACP leaders handled the legal representation before Mayor James Mi¬
chael Curley, Governor David I. Walsh, and others. That episode will be

William Monroe Trotter 129

discussed in the following chapter, and shows that black Bostonians still
looked to Trotter for leadership. In other cities, African-Americans were
turning to the NAACP, or, a few years later, to nationalism.

While Trotter had needlessly antagonized many people in both the Book-
erite and NAACP camps, he had also made and kept many close allies among
the African-American clergy, some attorneys, women’s club leaders and fra¬
ternal lodge men. The church leaders were the most important of this group.
Time and again, the Reverends William Scott of Woburn, Reverdy Ransom
of the Charles Street AME Church, M. A. N. Shaw of the Twelfth Baptist,
Byron Gunner of distant Newport, Rhode Island, and Johnson W. Hill spoke
on Trotter’s behalf, and probably mobilized their parishioners. Women’s club
leaders like M. Cravath Simpson and Elks leader Alfred P. Russell probably
also brought their sisters and brothers. 57 The movement that Trotter led was
rooted in the community, and from it his inspiration sprung.

Trotter’s local supporters were activists who made their way to Boston,
usually from the South, and were probably overawed by Trotter’s Harvard
background, driving energy, and principled politics. If they were not neces¬
sarily his intellectual equals, neither were they his lieutenants or creations. As
community ministers they were talented individuals in their own right.

Scott, Trotter’s most loyal supporter, was born a slave in Faquier Co., Vir¬
ginia, in 1848, ran away during the Civil War and attached himself to the
Twelfth Massachusetts Regiment as a quartermaster’s boy. After the war he
was ordained as a Baptist minister and pastored in Virginia, then Lawrence
and Woburn, Massachusetts. Along with George Forbes, he and Trotter
founded the Guardian , and he appeared at Trotter’s side as a key ally until
Scott’s death in 1910. 58

Johnson W. Hill, another Virginian, studied in his home state and then at
Harvard, Brown, and Newton Theological. In 1898 he became the pastor at
the Twelfth Baptist Church, Trotter’s favorite venue after Faneuil Hall. He
was with Trotter at the Booker Washington confrontation and on the plat¬
form at many Trotter meetings. 59

Mathew Arnold N. Shaw took over at Twelfth Baptist, perhaps after Hill
became a medical doctor in 1908, and his name appeared frequently in the
Guardian until his death in 1924. In 1919, for example, the Guardian devoted
much of its front page to a Shaw speech calling for self-defense against lynch¬
ing, contrasting Shaw’s address to a more cautious one by Du Bois. Byron
Gunner was born in Marion, Alabama, in 1857, educated at Talladega and
Oberlin, and became a Congregational minister at Hillburn, New York. For
a while he was president of Trotter’s National Equal Rights League. 60

Probably the best orator among Trotter’s supporters was Reverdy C. Ran-

130 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

som. Ransom was born in 1861 in Ohio, educated at Oberlin and Wilberforce,
and held challenging posts as an AME minister in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and
Chicago before coming to New Bedford, and then to Boston in 1905. He was
the keynote speaker at the Garrison memorial and other meetings. 61

Taken as a group, these ministers generally came from lower socioeco¬
nomic origins than the Boston elite African-American community leaders.
The activists with whom Trotter could not work included people like attor¬
neys Clement Morgan, Archibald Grimke, and Butler Wilson. These three
had abilities equal to Trotters and important ties to white people. George
Forbes and William Henry Lewis, southern migrants of humble origin like
Trotter’s allies, worked briefly with Trotter, but had professions that carried
them away from the community—Forbes as a librarian and literary man,
Lewis as an attorney. Neither those people who gravitated toward Booker
Washington (like Grimke for a few years between 1904 and 1906) nor those
who like Wilson, Morgan, or later Grimke, joined the NAACP, were so
rooted in the community as Trotter’s clerical supporters. 62

Trotter’s influence declined during the 1920s. The apex of Boston’s influ¬
ence within the national African-American polity was over as the Great Mi¬
gration established Harlem, Chicago’s South Side, and Washington, D.C.,
as the population and power centers of the New Negro of the 1920s. The
NAACP grew and attracted new African-American leaders; newspapers like
the Chicago Defender swamped the Guardian in circulation and resources.
Trotter was heard from less and less, and in 1934 he apparently jumped to his
death, although the newspapers said that he fell. He left no note, but he was
obviously in despair. Two thousand mourners came to the funeral, including
city and state officials, Harvard classmates, and Elks lodge men, to hear more
than a dozen clergymen eulogize him. 63 He was the intellectual child of his
militant father, Harvard, elite African-American society, abolitionism, and
most of all, the wider Boston African-American community. Always out of
step on the national stage, but the central leader in his own city, Trotter’s life
highlights the uniqueness of Boston’s contribution to the African-American
struggle.

Francis Jackson Garrison. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

FIVE

White Into Black

Boston s NAACP, 1909-1920

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was
born in the aftermath of the August 1908 riot at Springfield, Illinois, that
drove thousands of African-Americans from that city. This particular race
riot, although part of a wider national pattern, was especially symbolic be¬
cause it transpired in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown one year before the cen¬
tennial of his birth. After the Springfield violence, a small group of white
liberals in New York called for an interracial conference to discuss the status
of African-American rights. This National Negro Conference was ostensibly
scientific in nature, and refuted the claim that the Negro race was inherently
inferior to the white. More significant, the conferees also launched an activist
political organization that later became the NAACP, which dates its begin¬
ning to the 1909 meeting. 1

The new association grew out of and was a response to the failure of Pro-
gressivism to address the Negro problem. The political movement that
sought to regulate the corporation and purify the electoral process generally
shared the racial views of the wider society. Many NAACP leaders agreed
with the goals of Progressive reform and wanted to apply the movement’s
methods to American race relations. The outstanding example of this type of
leader was Oswald Garrison Villard, a chairman of the association in its pio¬
neer decade. As the grandson of Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison,
son of a railroad tycoon, and publisher of the New York Evening Post and the
Nation , he represented the fusion of the old New England antislavery tradi¬
tion with the Progressive impulse . 2

Although white reformers began the association, African-Americans orga¬
nized in William Edward Burghardt Du Bois’s Niagara movement joined the
new group and thousands of others did as well. By 1920 the association had

134 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

its first black national secretary in James Weldon Johnson. “This is the only
Association in the world where white and colored members work together
for the rights of colored people,” the organization’s literature proclaimed. By
1915 the association had almost five thousand members of whom 80 percent
were African-American, organized in thirty branches, and 150,000 readers of
its monthly journal, the Crisis . 3 Massachusetts-born and Harvard-educated
Du Bois, editor of the magazine, played the central role in transforming the
association from a group for black people to one primarily of and led by
them. When the NAACP was founded, the accommodationist Booker T.
Washington was just past the peak of his national authority, and William
Monroe Trotter’s activist National Independent Political League was a sig¬
nificant organization. By 1920, no viable national organization represented
either’s ideology, and the NAACP was the leading civil rights group in the
country. The NAACP cooperated with the Urban League, which helped find
jobs and housing for black people in the North, and was just beginning its
rivalry with Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. Al¬
though many national board members were white, almost all of its branches
were led by African-Americans.

Four strategic conceptions were central to the success of the NAACP.
Programatically, it pledged to achieve full equality of opportunity in all as¬
pects of life for African-Americans. Second, the NAACP utilized the Pro¬
gressive approach of educating the public as a means to win legislative and
legal battles. A corollary to this strategy was that the association remained
nonpartisan and, while it might champion local candidates, it made no lasting
pledge to either major party. Third, despite enormous difficulties engendered
by the pervasive racism of American society, the association tried to build a
biracial organization. Finally, it focused on civil rights, leaving aside wider
questions of economic policy, upon which the members disagreed. The lead¬
ership included some socialists like William English Walling and Charles
Edward Russell, and while Du Bois and Mary White Ovington shared some
of their views, they were in a distinct minority. More typical were liberals like
Villard, the Reverend John Haynes Holmes and the brothers Joel and Arthur
Spingarn. Many branch leaders were committed Republicans, some of whom
had traditional party economic views.

The NAACP thus differed from its competitors in the field of representing
the interests of African-Americans. The most obvious differences were with
Booker T. Washington, who relegated the achievement of equality to a dis¬
tant future. The association also differed with Boston’s William Monroe
Trotter, who campaigned aggressively for white politicians, built an all-black
movement, and generally eschewed the patient strategy of legislative lobbying

Boston's NAACP, 1909-1920 135

and court challenges that were hallmarks of Progressivism. Nor did the
NAACP entertain notions of separatism that won Marcus Garvey a following
in the early 1920s. 4

By early 1919, after ten years of existence, the association claimed 56,345
members organized in 220 branches, and the Crisis had a circulation of
100,000. By the end of that tumultuous year, the association had 91,203 mem¬
bers organized in 310 branches, about 90 percent of whom were black. This
phenomenal increase was facilitated by the Great Migration northward start¬
ing around 1915; the raised expectations of African-Americans as a result of
their participation in combat during the world war; and the dashing of these
hopes by the aftermath of both experiences. A wave of violence greeted the
migrants in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917. African-American soldiers were
provoked into a confrontation in Houston that year that resulted in long
prison terms or capital punishment for dozens. Whites attacked blacks in
Chicago and Washington, D.C., in 1919 and tenant organizers were massa¬
cred in Elaine, Arkansas. The NAACP campaigns against these outrages
won it new adherents. It also achieved minor but significant legal victories
against disfranchisement and residential segregation. What began as a project
of northern white liberals, among whom Bostonians were prominent, had
become a national African-American organization. 5

'‘descendants and relatives"

Despite the small size of Boston's African-American community, only 13,564
in 1910, Bostonians played a disproportionately powerful role in the new
movement. The Boston branch of the NAACP was the largest in the country
until 1918, reaching 2,553 members that year, when Washington, D.C., leaders
organized energetically among the capital’s vast black population. The Boston
leaders, mostly white men who descended from the abolitionists either liter¬
ally or intellectually, drew upon the antislavery tradition of the city to pro¬
mote the cause. Chapters in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia faltered
as Boston’s grew. 6 No city in America had an intellectual and abolitionist
history like Boston's and the NAACP crystallized the disparate elements of
this past into a new solution.

Initially, the Boston branch was singular in the whiteness of its leadership.
When the NAACP held its third annual meeting in Boston in March 1911,
the Boston Globe noted that “descendants and relatives of William Lloyd Gar¬
rison, Parker Pillsbury, Lucretia Mott and representatives of the Channing,
Clarke, Bowditch, Atkinson and other families” were in attendance. 7 How¬
ever, the Boston NAACP was a product of not only the white families identi-

136 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

fied by the Globe , but also of the work of William Cooper Nell, Frederick
Douglass, Maria W. Stewart, Charles Lenox Remond, Louis Hayden, and
other African-American activists of earlier generations. Fifty years after the
Civil War, Boston’s antislavery tradition still lived in the actions of the found¬
ers of the NAACP.

The leaders of the Boston branch were also remarkably old. They repre¬
sented the last vigorous defenders of the antislavery tradition in Boston; dur¬
ing the politically quiescent 1920s no new generation, black or white, came
forward with like energy. When the Boston branch was formally launched in
1912, Butler Wilson was 52, Moorfield Storey was 67, and Francis Jackson
Garrison was 64. They gathered around them a group of abolitionist descen¬
dants and aging reformers with distinguished careers and long political his¬
tories. Unlike the New York founders of the NAACP, there were no socialists
among the Bostonians, perhaps because the Boston labor movement was
more conservative and Irish than New York’s. The New Yorkers also included
secular Jewish-Americans like Henry Moscowitz and the brothers Joel and
Arthur Spingarn; the Bostonians were largely Yankee Protestants.

The Bostonians weighed heavily in the councils of the national organiza¬
tion. They included powerful legal figures like Storey, Albert E. Pillsbury,
and Butler Roland Wilson. Wilson and his wife Mary Evans Wilson were
the most prominent African-American leaders; attorney Clement Morgan
was less active. Francis Jackson Garrison, youngest son of William Lloyd
Garrison, was the president of the branch until his death in 1916 and he
corresponded at least weekly with his nephew Oswald Garrison Villard, ply¬
ing him with ideas and information. Horace Bumstead, Civil War veteran
and former president of Atlanta University, was an early influence upon Du
Bois when the latter was a faculty member at Atlanta University. The branch
treasurer from 1911 to 1920, businessman George G. Bradford, corresponded
with several national leaders regarding the association’s policies, as did Joseph
Prince Loud, branch president after Garrison’s death in 1916.

Although most of the leadership was white, the Wilsons directed much of
the association’s activity. Butler Wilson was the original secretary of the
branch and a national board member from 1913 onward; Mary Wilson was a
traveling organizer who recruited thousands of new members in several
northern states. In the 1920s Butler Wilson became the official branch presi¬
dent. He moved to Boston in 1881 after growing up near Atlanta and attend¬
ing Atlanta University. After receiving a law degree at Boston University he
worked with Archibald H. Grimke on the Hub , an African-American weekly,
in the mid-i88os. As an attorney he was pronounced a master of chancery by
the governor, and his clients were mostly white people. Early in his career he

Boston’s NAACP, 1909-1920 137

represented William Henry Lewis in an 1893 case that culminated in a legisla¬
tive expansion of the state’s civil rights law. As an upper-class militant he
presided over an anti-Booker Washington meeting at Young’s Hotel on 24
April 1899. He was one of the original signers of the call for the Niagara
movement, but was probably not very active in it. Wilson also kept his dis¬
tance from Monroe Trotter in the pre-NAACP years, but was friendly with
Francis Jackson Garrison. 8

Mary Evans Wilson was also a transplanted southerner. Like most women
of her day she played a less prominent public role than her husband, but a
nontheless indispensable one in building the organization behind the scenes.
She did speak publicly, and in 1915 she toured Ohio, western New York, and
Pennsylvania, laying the groundwork for new branches in those states, meet¬
ing with church and community leaders and recruiting them to the NAACP.
She made similar tours in New Jersey, and led the recruitment of two thou¬
sand African-Americans to the Boston NAACP after the world war. 9

More than anyone else, the Wilsons convinced African-American Bosto¬
nians to join the NAACP. They did this in a community divided among
supporters of Booker Washington, Monroe Trotter, and probably a majority
who saw some merit to each approach. The Wilsons linked the black com¬
munity and an organization that many African-Americans at first probably
saw as an elite white ally. The NAACP wooed moderate African-American
Bookerites like Maria Baldwin, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, James H. Wolff,
and Edward Everett Brown with varying degrees of success. Like most white
NAACP leaders, Butler Wilson was a middle-class integrationist. In a reveal¬
ing moment, he once told Mary White Ovington as they passed some dice¬
throwing black youth that if they would not go to an integrated YMCA they
could “rot.” He was light-hued enough that, on a visit to Du Bois’s office
in New York, he was mistaken for a white man, and, arriving without an
appointment, never got in to see the editor, who was, ironically, of similar
color. In politics, Wilson was a regular Republican, but he got along socially
with political independents in the NAACP like Archibald Grimke, Moor-
field Storey, and Francis Jackson Garrison. This suggests that Wilson, like
other prominent African-American NAACP leaders, lived at the junction of
several intersecting racial, professional, class, and political worlds . 10

Storey was the first national president of the association and its most re¬
spected legal strategist. A corporation lawyer, as a young man he had been a
secretary to Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner during Reconstruction.
He crafted the organization’s Supreme Court cases against the “grandfather”
clause in an Oklahoma case, another against a residential segregation order
in Louisville, Kentucky, and he was an architect of the campaign against

138 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

lynching. The association honored him by naming its first recruitment drive
for him. Storey was also a prominent leader of the anti-imperialist movement,
and his protean career is the subject of three biographies. Because he acted
more upon the national than the local scene, his contribution will be more
fully discussed in a subsequent chapter on law. 11

Another prominent attorney in the Boston NAACP was Albert E. Pills-
bury, a nephew of the Garrisonian abolitionist Parker Pillsbury. He served as
Massachusetts attorney general between 1891 and 1894 and had been a lecturer
in constitutional law at Boston University Law School. In 1901 he counseled
Booker Washington on how best to challenge Louisiana’s disfranchisement
law, but the case did not come to court. Testifying to Pillsburys difficult
personality, Moorfield Storey advised Villard that he “is very much in earnest,
but his manner and attitude are such that most of us here find it impossible
to work with him. I have a very sincere respect for him, and I get along with
him, but it is not always easy.” 12 Pillsburys generally gloomy assessments of
the prospects for change never destroyed his own commitment to the cause.
“Candidly, and between ourselves, the movement has turned out a disap¬
pointment to me,” he wrote to NAACP leader Mary White Ovington as
early as January 1912. He had hoped for a movement of “commanding na¬
tional influence and authority . . . especially to develop a counteracting and
nullifying influence to the pernicious activities of Booker T. Washington.”
He later warned Archibald Grimke testily against beginning an agitation for
voting rights in the aftermath of American intervention in the world war.
Nevertheless, he was a frequent public speaker for the Boston branch and a
legal adviser nationally. 13

Clement Morgan was not especially active in the branch’s work, but his
membership on the executive committee suggested that the leadership
wanted to encourage African-American participation. Morgan (1859-1929)
was a Virginia-born son of slaves. He moved to Boston around 1885, worked
his way through Harvard and was chosen as Class Day orator in 1890. He
attended Harvard Law School, and practiced law in Cambridge for the rest
of his career. As a student he was a friend of Du Bois, and later was his
closest ally and the key leader of the local Niagara movement. The antipathy
of Morgan and Du Bois toward Trotter carried over into the period of build¬
ing the NAACP. Against the wishes of whites in the fledgling group, Mor¬
gan counterposed his own Charles Sumner memorial meeting to a similar
Trotter-sponsored event in January 1911. 14 During Du Bois’s conflict with
Villard in the NAACP national office, Morgan backed Du Bois, which fur¬
ther alienated him from some of the white Boston leaders. May Childs Ner-
ney, attempting to mediate the national office dispute, wrote to Archibald

Boston's NAACP, 1909-1920 139

Grimke of a “Morgan-Hare” clique in the Boston branch that was opposed
to the local leadership, probably for its failure to support Du Bois. The
“Hare” to whom Nerney referred was the pianist Maud Cuney Hare, with
whom Du Bois had fallen in love while at Harvard. There were probably
some racial tensions within the Boston NAACP as well as tensions between
the white-led group and more moderate or radical African-American activ¬
ists. The Boston NAACP leaders were acutely conscious of these problems
and did what they could to broaden the leadership base. 15

Beside these lawyers the Boston NAACP had other prominent national
leaders. Francis Jackson Garrison, discussed earlier as a supporter of Booker
Washington, was a loyal son of his famous father and typified the second-
generation abolitionist. Born in 1848, he set the type on the last issue of the
Liberator with his father, and wrote William Lloyd Garrison’s biography with
one of his brothers. For most of his adult life he worked as an editor at
Houghton Mifflin, and served as a curator and chronicler of the abolition
movement. He had been an enthusiastic supporter of Booker Washington,
but became the first president of the Boston NAACP and held the post until
his death in December 1916. Joseph Prince Loud, an architect, succeeded
Garrison as branch president upon the latter’s death. He married May Hallo-
well, of the Quaker abolitionist family. (Richard Price Hallowell had re¬
cruited troops for the Massachusetts 54th and 55th Regiments; Colonel
Norwood Penrose Hallowell commanded black troops during the war; May
Hallowell Loud and J. Mott Hallowell were NAACP activists.) Adelene
Moffatt, a social worker originally from Kentucky, and Rolfe Cobleigh, the
assistant editor of the Congregationalist , complete the picture of NAACP
leaders with successful careers and/or some abolitionist heritage. 16

A RECORD OF LOCAL ACTIVISM

The NAACP made its first major impact on Boston when the third national
conference was held at the Park Street Church in March 1911. This was a
particularly difficult moment for the new group. It had on its board many
contributors to Tuskegee Institute, and some of its members, especially Trot¬
ter and his allies, might attack Booker Washington. The principal was then
particularly vulnerable. A few weeks before the meeting, a white New Yorker
physically assaulted Washington, accusing him of peeking through a keyhole
at a woman. The police arrested the white man, but Washington could not
explain why he was at the building, and he refused to press charges. The
Boston NAACP leaders explored a variety of responses to the highly publi¬
cized incident, and ultimately passed a resolution condemning the assault

140 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

without commenting on Washington’s mysterious behavior. Trotter also
came to Washington’s defense, although a few months later he insisted that
Washington should charge his attacker. Not even Washington’s judicious bi¬
ographer can explain the affair, which marked a deterioration of Washing¬
ton’s position.

Between eight hundred and one thousand people attended and the local
press reported the conference favorably. Moorfield Storey presided at the
opening session, insisting that the Civil War amendments be revived and that
Negroes be guaranteed full rights and the equal protection of the law. Mayor
John F. Fitzgerald greeted the conferees warmly, and Villard, Du Bois,
Adelene Moffatt, and Rabbi Charles Fleischer took up separate themes call¬
ing for full equality. Pillsbury chaired the next session, which heard from
reformers Florence Kelley, John E. Milholland, and Mary Church Terrell.
The following day Samuel J. Elder, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of New York,
and the Reverend G. R. Waller of Baltimore spoke. Monroe Trotter praised
the meeting, encouraged Boston African-Americans to attend, and ignored
its results. Neither the daily press nor the Crisis reported on the racial compo¬
sition of the assembly. Clearly, the prominence of the speakers, the press
coverage, and the attendance augured well for the new association . 17

The following May, fifty-eight people came to an organizational meeting
that addressed the question of separate black community institutions by in¬
sisting upon the rights of African-Americans to participate in all aspects of
American life. When the Boston Floating Hospital refused to employ Afri¬
can-American nurses and the YMCA discriminated against black members,
the NAACP sent protest letters to each offending board of directors. At a
time when white ethnic groups were establishing their own social institutions,
the local NAACP never publicly expressed itself on African-American efforts
to build separate medical or recreational facilities. Later in the month, the
NAACP intervened on behalf of a woman denied a diploma from the Boston
School for Domestic Science, and had the decision overturned . 18

In November, Trotter and the NAACP showed they could peacefully coex¬
ist during the Wendell Phillips centennial celebration. This occasion was the
last citywide celebration of the life of a once-scorned abolitionist now safely
deceased. One hundred thousand public school students participated in vari¬
ous ceremonies throughout the metropolitan area. At the NAACP’s meeting,
Wendell Phillips Stafford, an associate justice of the Washington, D.C., Su¬
preme Court and grandson of a Massachusetts abolitionist, gave the keynote
address. Stafford eulogized not only Phillips’s abolitionism, but also his fight
for labor reform. Moorfield Storey decried the denial of justice to Negroes in
the courts, and the increasing sadism of lynch mobs. Recalling the August

Boston’s NAACP, 1909-1920 141

lynching of a colored man at Coatesville, Pennsylvania, he said there would
have been a greater storm of protest had the victim been a dog . 19

In January 1912, Du Bois toured Massachusetts reporting on the 1911 Races
Conference in London. He spoke in Boston at the Twentieth Century Club,
and at Braintree and Brockton. This sojourn helped lay the basis for the 8
February meeting of fifty-six people that formally founded the Boston
branch. Joel Spingarn of New York gave the main address. Garrison was
elected president; Wilson, secretary; and George Bradford, treasurer. The
executive committee consisted of Maria Baldwin, Horace Bumstead, Joseph
Loud, May Hallowell Loud, Adelene Moffatt, and Clement Morgan. Thus
three of the top nine leaders were African-Americans, but only Wilson was
consistently active. Also, three of the nine were women. 20

The Boston NAACP fought against the American Bar Association when
it attempted to draw the color line against three African-American attorneys.
The ABA admitted Bostonians Butler Wilson and William Henry Lewis
and Minnesotan William R. Morris without realizing that they were black.
Lewis was by far the most prominent of the three, and the ABA’s executive
committee voted to expel him in 1912. The ABA discovered the race of Wil¬
son and Morris after its 1912 executive committee meeting and before its
annual convention; they were asked to resign by mail. 21

As the ABA conference approached, Albert E. Pillsbury and five other
members of the Massachusetts Bar Association solicited the opinion of the
Massachusetts members by circular letter, finding that a huge majority of
respondents opposed the expulsion of Lewis (220-4) an d the introduction of
the color line into the ABA (218-6). Pillsbury and Boston Juvenile Court
Chief Justice Harvey Humphrey Baker carried the fight to the floor of the
convention. Attorney General George W. Wickersham stood up for Lewis,
but did not oppose barring African-Americans in the future. The ABA had
no formal policy at the time, but it did have an unspoken tradition of racial
exclusivity. Henceforth, the ABA decided that applicants would have to de¬
clare their race . 22 Morris, the Minnesotan, thereupon withdrew from the or¬
ganization as the only way to maintain his self-respect. Wilson vowed to stay
and fight. Storey drew up a circular letter to all ABA members that was
signed by leaders of the Massachusetts Bar Association, and by 1914 the ABA
retracted a section of its Milwaukee resolution which stated that the admis¬
sion of blacks had never been contemplated by the Bar Association. This
cleared the way for African-American attorneys to join the ABA . 23

The irascible Pillsbury fired off an angry letter of resignation to the ABA in
1913. “A handful of southern colorphobes, with the help of the usual northern
majority, have captured it and turned it into a sort of Bourbon club. . . . The

142 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

Association is no longer a Bar Association in any proper sense,” he declared.
The northern press generally supported the NAACP position, the Boston
press especially, and despite Pillsbury’s gloomy prognostication, the NAACP
opened the doors of American life a bit wider through this episode . 24

The year 1913 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Procla¬
mation, and if the event was celebrated by the various Boston factions sepa¬
rately, the spirit of factionalism was missing. The Wendell Phillips Memorial
Association held a meeting at the Park Street Church, addressed by Trotter
and future governor Samuel W. McCall, and a smaller meeting sponsored by
the Lincoln Memorial Society was chaired by Butler Wilson. Former Har¬
vard president Charles W. Eliot gave a Booker Washington-like speech, and
Trotter ally Reverdy Ransom was also on the platform, suggesting that fac¬
tional tensions were diminishing. Garrison reported Trotters meeting favor¬
ably to Villard. 25

On Lincoln’s birthday Pillsbury spoke for the NAACP at its commemora¬
tion, declaring that the president would always be remembered as “an eman¬
cipator of a race and martyr of freedom.” He praised Lincoln as a man of
complete sincerity, who lived by his antislavery sentiments. Thus, the genera¬
tion of abolitionist descendants rejected the criticisms of Lincoln by their
antecedents. Uncle Parker Pillsbury had once vowed that, “by the grace of
God and the Saxon tongue,” he would fight the “hypocrisy and cruelty” of
Lincoln. Wendell Phillips saw Lincoln as “a huckster in politics,” but the
NAACP leaders wisely projected themselves as legitimate heirs of Lincoln,
implying that those who sought to curtail civil rights were violating his
legacy. 26

Among these violators of the Lincoln legacy was Woodrow Wilson, the
newly sworn president of the United States, whose postmaster-general, Al¬
bert S. Burleson, initiated the segregation of the federal departments as early
as April 1913. Not only were civil service workers segregated, but black politi¬
cal appointees were generally let go and replaced by whites. Southerners were
more dominant in the administration and in Congress than at any time since
the Civil War, and Wilson’s election put wind in the sails of Negro-haters
everywhere. One by one the federal departments were segregated, and oppo¬
nents of the new policy dismissed. Segregation was now national, and inte¬
gration local. 27

The irony of this situation was that Villard, Du Bois, Storey, and Trotter
had all supported Wilson in the election of 1912. The Progressive Villard had
been an enthusiastic backer of Wilson. Du Bois had first hoped for a Theo¬
dore Roosevelt victory, and several NAACP leaders acting as individuals
urged a civil rights plank on the Bull Moose convention, only to be rudely

Boston’s NAACP, 1909-1920 143

rebuffed. Du Bois then turned to Wilson, who signed a vague statement
promising “justice” for African-Americans. The Boston NAACP leaders,
perhaps because they lived in a city dominated by Irish Democratic politicians
they considered corrupt, were more chary of Wilson. Moorfield Storey reluc¬
tantly voted for him, but six months into the new administration he reminded
Villard that the president “was a man of southern antecedents, and I have
never really believed that he did not share the race prejudice which is today
the fashion.” Francis Jackson Garrison warned against any overture to Roose¬
velt, whom he hated as a proven racist and imperialist. Garrison warned
Villard that “someday you will have to train your guns on Wilson.” Butler
Wilson, a lifelong Republican, probably stayed with Taft. Unlike Monroe
Trotter’s movement, which divided over the 1912 contest, the NAACP did
not endorse presidential candidates as an organization, and suffered no inter¬
nal crisis over the election. 28

At the national level, Villard attempted to persuade Woodrow Wilson to
establish a Race Commission, which in true Progressive fashion would study
the problem and solve it. The president led Villard on for a while, but backed
down, sacrificing black rights on the altar of wider reform for which he
needed southern support. By August 1913, just as Garrison predicted, the
NAACP rebuked the president, issuing a public letter of protest that was
widely reported in the national press. 29

In Boston, Trotter sought the advice of Storey, a fellow Woodrow Wilson
supporter. He invited the NAACP leader to appear before a September
meeting of his organization. Storey declined, but replied that “we should
approach the President as his friends and supporters, presenting to him our
views with courtesy. . . . This is no time to abuse him, to cast doubt upon his
motives, to assume that what his subordinates have done will be sustained by
him.” Trotter duly followed Story’s advice, and found himself left behind as
the national black press vented its anger upon the president . 30

The Boston NAACP, despite Storey’s caution, joined in the nationwide
attack that the association launched against segregation in the capital. What¬
ever his reservations, Storey chaired a 20 October meeting at the Park Street
Church at which Minnesota Senator Moses E. Clapp, Pillsbury, Butler Wil¬
son, assistant editor of the Congregationalist Rolfe Cobleigh, and the Rever¬
ends Theodore A. Auten and Samuel A. Crothers hotly arraigned the
president’s segregation policy. Governor Eugene Foss, Congressman A. P.
Gardner, and other prominent citizens sent messages of support, and the
assembly dispatched a sternly worded telegram to the White House. “With
the meeting as a whole, Pillsbury, who had been very lukewarm and hesitant,

144 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

was thoroughly delighted, and Clapp's speech he thought extraordinarily
good,” Garrison reported to his nephew . 31

This was followed by another meeting at Faneuil Hall on i December.
Butler Wilson appealed to the African-American community's church leaders
to attend. “My only regret is that the brunt of labor for our meetings falls on
Butler Wilson, who is overloaded. He is going now to go personally to all
the Masonic bodies of colored men to stir them up,” Garrison informed
Villard. The Odd Fellows responded to Wilson’s appeal by marching to the
meeting from the West End, led by the Reverend (Congregationalist) Samuel
A. Brown. A second march came from the South End, and many African-
American clergymen sat on the NAACP's platform. Among the speakers
were Storey, Villard, Bumstead, and Rabbi M. M. Eichler . 32

This meeting was clearly a triumph for the association, and for Butler
Wilson personally. For the first time the NAACP worked in tandem with
African-American church and fraternal groups. The budding relationship
was facilitated by Trotter’s more cautious approach toward Woodrow Wilson.
He was still pursuing an inside track, not wishing to burn his bridges to the
president. His supporters gathered signatures on a petition that they pre¬
sented to him at the White House. Meanwhile, the Boston NAACP was
openly mobilizing the black community to protest in the streets. Butler Wil¬
son’s lifelong Republican loyalties probably made this an emotionally satisfy¬
ing task. Trotter and the NAACP were working on “parallel lines” as Trotter’s
biographer Stephen Fox notes, but the NAACP’s officially nonpartisan stance
left it more free to attack the Democratic president . 33

The association helped prepare these inroads by participating in local
battles against race prejudice, usually by exerting the authority its leaders
possessed as attorneys or distinguished citizens. For example, when a light¬
skinned African-American child was removed from a private kindergarten
after her race was discovered, the NAACP objected, arguing that the school
was in part public and tax-supported. The teacher relented and a small victory
was gained. The YMCA barred an African-American member from its
swimming pool, so Wilson and Garrison spoke before the board and won a
reversal. “I know Arthur Johnson, the president, and ... I think the Directors
will hardly care for the advertising I assured them the institution would re¬
ceive if they drew the color line,” Garrison wrote. When a high school gradu¬
ate was kept from a dental school because of his color, the NAACP
overturned that decision as well. These important individual victories helped
establish the NAACP as a fighter for African-American rights . 34

The NAACP launched social service agencies such as the Committee on
Industrial Opportunities and a legal aid bureau. The former drew up a list of

Boston’s NAACP, 1909-1920 145

businesses that employed African-Americans, thus providing a refutation to
the common argument of prospective employers that white workers would
always object to black co-workers. The committee also intervened on behalf
of workers who suffered employment discrimination, defending in one case a
civil service employee released from her job. The legal aid bureau reported
helping thirty-three people in 1913 and the same number in 1919. 35 In 1916
Jane R. Bosfield, an African-American stenographer at the Medfield Asylum,
was fired for insubordination when she refused to eat apart from the white
employees. Although the newspaper accounts do not say that her attorney
was an NAACP lawyer, the association’s mere existence certainly encouraged
African-Americans like the nineteen-year-old Bosfield to stand up for their
rights. 36

In November 1914 the association convinced the Boston School Committee
to dispense with the songbook “Forty Best Old Songs,” which included ob¬
jectionable lyrics. An integrated group of protesters attended a School Com¬
mittee meeting and Storey, Wilson, the Reverends Montrose W. Thornton
of the First AME Church and Samuel A. Brown of St. Mark’s Congrega¬
tional testified to the harm done to children by lyrics about contented “dark¬
ies” on the old plantation. NAACP member Elizabeth Putnam presented a
protest petition with the names of eminent Boston citizens, and the case was
quickly won. The books cost $1,500, but the committee agreed after an hour
of hearings to dispose of them. “The colored ministers made an admirable
protest to the School Committee,” Garrison noted with satisfaction. When
southern school boards, hearing of the clamor in Boston, requested the books
for their districts, the publisher replied that the entire edition had been dis¬
continued. 37

Having taken on the Wilson administration and local discrimination, the
Boston NAACP next turned to congressional attempts to legislate against
intermarriage. The dominance of southerners in Wilson’s cabinet embold¬
ened legislators who sought to limit civil rights. They moved first against a
practice of which most people of both races probably disapproved. Garrison
wrote to Massachusetts Senators Henry Cabot Lodge and John W. Weeks
and several congressmen to ascertain their views. Weeks supported the bill,
and Lodge condemned intermarriage as harmful to both races, but was not
sure that legislation banning it was appropriate. Garrison replied that Booker
Washington and Frederick Douglass, as the products of interracial parentage,
proved that there was nothing wrong with intermarriage. 38

The centerpiece of the local campaign was a large public meeting held on
7 March, “Daniel Webster’s Day,” Garrison sarcastically noted. For Garrison,
the present was always inextricably linked with the antislavery past and his

146 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

fathers battles with conservatives like Daniel Webster, whose Seventh of
March speech justified the Fugitive Slave Act. The meeting was attended by
3,200 people, by far the largest event the association had staged. Congress¬
man Martin B. Madden of Illinois was the featured orator, and Mary Wilson
and New Yorker Joel Spingarn spoke for the association. The congressman
attacked the disproportionate number of southern committee chairmen in
Congress due to the seniority system and the single party dominance of the
South. As for intermarriage, he probably voiced the sentiments of most
northerners by opposing both the practice and the laws against it. Perhaps
because intermarriage was so unusual anyway, Congress never passed the
bill. 39 The meeting also marked further progress for the NAACP within the
African-American community. “All the papers gave fair reports and we feel
we have strengthened our grip here,” Garrison wrote. “The colored ministers
cooperated splendidly and rally their people to us.” 40

Nevertheless, Garrison’s letter reveals a clear distinction in his mind be¬
tween “them” and a white “us,” a theme that was to assume more importance
as the black community continued to mobilize. During the 1915 campaign
against the film The Birth of a Nation , the NAACP served as spokespeople
to the powerful, while Trotter served as spokesman for the community. We
shall consider this struggle in a separate section. Boston NAACP members,
especially Moorfield Storey, also helped craft the national campaign against
lynching, which will be discussed in the chapter on law.

Until the 1960s, a significant amount of the NAACP’s energy was devoted
to opposing the extradition of accused felons from northern to southern
states, by arguing that the accused might be lynched. The Boston branch
defended John Johnson, who fled Charleston, West Virginia, after being ac¬
cused of a crime against a white woman. In late 1917, Massachusetts governor
Samuel McCall refused to extradite Johnson, accepting the NAACP argu¬
ment. West Virginia, a relatively liberal border state, took the issue to federal
court the following spring and Butler Wilson, William Henry Lewis, and
Richard W. Hale argued the case and won. The lawyers worked without pay
for ten days, and the Boston branch and national office of the NAACP cov¬
ered the legal expenses. 41

As African-American troops fought and died in the world war, their con¬
sciousness was transformed by the experience of combat, and the contradic¬
tion of fighting a war for democracy when it was denied to them at home.
The Boston branch defended the men of the Thirteenth Battalion, 151st
Depot Brigade of African-American troops, who were waiting to be demobi¬
lized in October 1918 at nearby Fort Devens. The problem arose when white
New England officers were replaced by southerners. The new officers began

Boston’s NAACP, 1909-1920 147

cursing, hitting, and humiliating the troops by assigning unnecesary labor
details. The officers expressed openly racist sentiments, and the soldiers, un¬
accustomed to such treatment and in no mood to endure it, complained to
the War Department. Emmet J. Scott, the former aide to Booker Washing¬
ton who oversaw race relations in the War Department, dispatched an envoy
who apparently reported that the problem had been resolved . 42

This hasty conclusion proved to be overoptimistic. Private Harold W.
Coleman of the 151st wrote to the NAACP in New York that “they are now
issuing to our sergeants, who are white men, revolvers. Since they choose to
regard us as so many dogs or slaves we have lost interest in it all.” This was
the voice of the New Negro, who in civilian dress was joining the NAACP
or the Marcus Garvey movement and changing the face of racial politics.
Coleman’s implication was that the small arms issued to the sergeants were
designed to be used against the black soldiers. “Officers have told men that
they would court-martial them if they caught them using a white man’s la¬
trine again,” wrote Nelson Dukes of the 443rd Reserve Labor Battalion a few
months later. Besides the usual gripes about food and pay, Dukes reported
that a soldier who complained to the War Department had been busted in
rank from corporal to private. 43

Butler Wilson went to Fort Devens to investigate, and found that the
Dukes allegations were true. Wilson tried to find noncommissioned officers
who would swear out affidavits, but the situation was resolved without legal
action. At its annual meeting at the end of 1919, the branch reported that it
“used its influence for the discharge of these men with varying degrees of
success; the men being discharged here and there, but not in large numbers.”
That the soldiers had turned first to the NAACP for aid indicated the au¬
thoritative position the association occupied, nationally and locally, by the
end of the decade. 44

THE NAACP VERSUS THE BIRTH OF A NATION

During the fight against the David Wark Griffith movie The Birth of a Nation
the NAACP was still in transition to achieving this prominence. It func¬
tioned with the community’s support as legal and public relations advocate,
but Monroe Trotter was still the spokesperson for the black community when
it gathered together. The two groupings conducted separate but related activ¬
ities, keeping their factional rivalries hidden from view.

Griffith’s masterpiece opened in Los Angeles in February 1915 and the
battle to ban the film began immediately. Based on Thomas Dixon’s novel
The Clansman , the motion picture portrayed robed nightriders as saviors of

148 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

the white South, a land ravaged during Reconstruction by debauched Afri¬
can-Americans and cynical northern politicians. Brilliantly innovative in its
cinematic technique, the film depicted African-American males as rapacious,
ignorant, and corrupt. Dixon showed the film to his old schoolmate Wood-
row Wilson, who allegedly declared the new medium to be “like writing
history with lightning/’ Lynching increased during 1915, and during one
showing of the film in Indiana, a white man shot a black youth. Shortly after
the film came to Boston in April 1915, Jewish factory manager Leo Frank was
lynched in Georgia after his death sentence was commuted to life imprison¬
ment. Racial tension nationally was simmering, and the Griffith film raised
the temperature. 45

The NAACP by this time had the advantage of being a biracial national
organization with a directing center. When Butler Wilson notified headquar¬
ters that the film was scheduled to open in Boston on 10 April, requesting
“all facts you have against the abomination,” May Childs Nerney could fur¬
nish the branches with the necessary details. A voluntary board of censorship
in New York had approved the show, but only after being apprised by the
producer that $100,000-8200,000 had been invested in production and ad¬
vertising. One viewer reportedly vowed to “kill every nigger I know” after
seeing the film, Nerney wrote. 46

Advocates of banning the movie had to make the difficult case, however,
that the film in fact inspired racist violence. It was one thing to argue that
the film slandered black people, or that it was historically inaccurate, but
those problems did not meet the test posed by legitimate advocates of free
speech. Censorship was practiced widely in the early twentieth century, usu¬
ally on the Victorian ground of restricting lewdness, and Boston of course
was already famous for its puritanical squelching of the theater. The challenge
for Griffith opponents was to stick to the only valid reason to ban the film:
that it posed a real danger to African-American physical safety.

This was difficult to do in Boston. Unlike most other northern cities, Bos¬
ton still was relatively free of racist violence. Besides that, there was a real
temptation to argue for suppression on puritanical grounds. Mayor James
Michael Curley and Brahmin Boston, through its Watch and Ward Society,
shared an abhorrence of public reference to sexuality. Curley had even cen¬
sored barefoot dancing on the Boston stage. The Birth of a Nation , with its
theme of black male lust for white women, was, by Boston standards, sugges¬
tively pornographic. 47

Curley assented to the association’s request that a public hearing be held
on the film, and Mary White Ovington came up from New York to appear
before the mayor. Although she was determined to press the case that the

Boston’s NAACP, 1909-1920 149

film might encourage racist violence, when she confessed to being shocked at
the film’s eroticism, the wily Curley suggested that Shakespeare could be
banned on the same ground. Ovington, still hoping for positive action by
Curley, found him to be “a democratic and kindly Irishman.” Trotter made a
direct, political appeal to Curley, in language that he might be expected to
understand: colored people had voted for him; he, Trotter, had endorsed him,
and now it was time to pay his political debts. Curley, to the consternation
of his mostly African-American audience, requested Griffith to cut some
scenes that might be construed as lewd, to which Griffith agreed, and the
film was shown as scheduled. 48

One week later, Trotter, the Reverend Aaron W. Puller and nine others
were arrested at a Saturday night melee at the Tremont Theater where the
film was being shown. On Sunday, Trotter and Frank Sanborn, a surviving
member of John Brown’s Secret Six financial backers, hosted a Faneuil Hall
meeting attended by fifteen hundred people, mostly African-American. Trot¬
ter was the featured speaker, and he arraigned both Curley and two members
of the National Negro Business League who allegedly had defended the
movie (both later denied doing so). A host of African-American ministers
also spoke. 49

The next day a throng of about the same size descended on the statehouse.
Attorneys Butler Wilson, William Henry Lewis, and three others met with
Governor David I. Walsh, who issued a statement of sympathy and support,
promising to press for new state legislation if no redress could be gained at
an upcoming court hearing. While Trotter was not in the small group that
met with the governor, Walsh called upon him to address the crowd. During
the next week, Storey, Wilson, Lewis, Adelene Moffatt, J. Mott Hallowell,
and other leaders testified either in court for a restraining order against the
theater manager or in a state legislative committee on behalf of the Lewis R.
Sullivan bill, which would establish a new censorship board. The judge effec¬
tively consented to restrain lewdness rather than racism; the legislature de¬
bated transferring Curley’s power to a state committee, composed of Boston’s
mayor, the police commissioner (then a state appointee), and the chief justice
of the municipal court. 50

The association backed the bill, which would prohibit “any show or enter¬
tainment which tends to excite racial or religious prejudice or tends to a
breach of the public peace.” The motivation for the state board was that 85
percent of the movies shown in the state were shown in Boston. NAACP
leaders Storey, Wilson, Moffatt, and J. Mott Hallowell testified for the bill
along with moderate attorney William Henry Lewis and a group of Congre¬
gational and Unitarian ministers. 51

150 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

The language of this bill was excessively broad, even for 1915, and the
theater owners made the most of it. They ran large ads in the newspapers,
urging legislators to “Kill the Sullivan Bill.” The ads reprinted editorials from
the Boston dailies, all making free speech arguments. “Were such a statute in
operation today our citizens of German sympathies could prevent by resolu¬
tions of protest or threats of violence the exhibition of any film showing the
devastation in Belgium,” read the excerpt from the Boston Transcript. The
Boston Journal approved the contents of the film as “patriotic” and “true
Americanism.” An editorial entitled “The Throttling of the Theater” in the
Boston Globe took a neutral view of the film but rejected the increased powers
of censorship granted to the state by the Sullivan bill. The newspapers may
have been influenced by their advertising budgets, according to Rolfe Cob-
leigh, NAACP member and editor of the Congregationalist and Christian
World. Decrying editorial support for the movie, he pointed out that the
Boston Post had at first denounced the film, but changed its tune when it
began running advertisements for the movie. Cobleigh opposed the film as
“un-Christian” and agreed that it should be banned. 52

Beside the newspapers, other voices opposed banning the film. Rabbi
Charles Fleischer, who had earlier supported the NAACP, testified against
banning the film on the ground that it would force the country to face the
race problem. As a Jew, he said, he did not enjoy Shylock, but he argued that
the Jews had been strengthened by persecution. “The Negroes have made
splendid progress in the last fifty years but the large majority of them are still
children, and this statement is proven by their action in Boston.” Writing in
the Boston Herald Fleischer defended the film's portrayal of Reconstruction
as accurate. Moorfield Storey replied to Fleischer, correcting his version of
Reconstruction history and condemning the film as a corrupter of public
morals . 53

In its campaign to defend African-American character and accurate Re¬
construction history, the association was as successful as print and speech
could be against the new medium of film. The Boston Post and the Boston
Traveller proved to be the friendliest outlets for the NAACP. The Traveller
ran a long article contrasting the actual record of the Ku Klux Klan in the
Carolinas, the setting of the film, to the Griffith version. These papers also
printed letters from NAACP members and supporters. During the public
meetings before the mayor, the state legislative committee, and the municipal
judge, the NAACP leaders were the most prominent spokespeople against
the film. Nevertheless, while the debate raged, thousands of Bostonians
flocked to the theaters . 54

On 26 April, the African-American community mobilized in two more

Boston’s NAACP, 1909-1920 151

shows of determination against the film and Mayor Curley. In the afternoon,
eight hundred women formed a protective league, led by Mrs. Olivia Ward
Bush-Banks, Minnie T. Wright, and Dr. Alice McKane. Clement Morgan,
Trotter, and his ally the Reverend M. A. N. Shaw, at whose Twelfth Baptist
Church the meeting was held, spoke along with the women leaders. That
night, Trotter’s National Independent Equal Rights League overflowed the
same AME Zion Church at which he had confronted Booker Washington
twelve years earlier. Key Trotter allies attorney Emery T. Morris, the Rever¬
ends Shaw and Puller, and other speakers prepared the crowd for the struggle
to come. The next day five hundred “mostly colored” people packed the state
Judiciary Committee hearings on the Sullivan bill, making their feelings
known by a disciplined presence. 55

The groups held separate protest meetings on Sunday, 2 May, the NAACP
at the Tremont Temple and Trotter’s group immediately afterward, outside
on the Common. The meetings were roughly equal in size and probably drew
overlapping constituencies. The press described the NAACP’s audience as
largely “colored.” Its speakers’ list was equally white, featuring former Har¬
vard president Charles W. Eliot, Dr. S. M. Crothers, an African-American
clergyman, Dr. Francis Rowley, Adelene Moffatt, Rolfe Cobleigh, and Susan
Fitzgerald. Judge Phillip Rubenstein and Rabbi M. M. Eichler effectively
rebutted Rabbi Fleischer’s argument about race discrimination as a character-
builder. Eliot received a standing ovation when he was introduced but deliv¬
ered an ambivalent speech that questioned whether the film was in fact racist.
Cobleigh made the most important and dramatic point when he revealed
that Thomas Dixon, author of the book upon which the movie was based,
had confessed to him that the purpose of the book was “the achieving of
white supremacy and the getting rid of the colored people.” However, by
presenting this virtually all-white speakers’ list before a largely black audience,
the NAACP showed that it was still an organization for the African-Ameri¬
can people, but not yet of them. 56

By contrast, the rally on the Boston Common was addressed by several
African-American ministers, including the Reverend M. W. Thornton of
Charles Street Methodist, Walter McLean, Benjamin Swain, D. O. Walker
of Chelsea, and M. A. N. Shaw of the Twelfth Baptist. The daily newspapers
did not bother to record their words, as might be expected, but the Crisis did
worse by suggesting that the rally on the Common was also an NAACP-
sponsored event. William Brigham, a white follower of Trotter’s, protested
to Du Bois that he had further neglected to credit the earlier Faneuil Hall
protest to Trotter. Brigham argued that there was room for both the NAACP
and Trotter’s group, both of which he supported. “I try to be fair,” Du Bois

152 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

replied. “On the other hand I do not propose to burden the columns of The
Crisis simply with names and particularly with names of small organizations.”
Du Bois would rather ignore Trotter than give him credit where it was due. 57

Later in May Governor Walsh signed into law a bill with more narrow
language than the Sullivan bill, and establishing the three-person committee.
Two weeks later the committee met, the members having viewed the film
individually. They heard from Wilson, Lewis, and J. Mott Hallowell, but
Trotter was not admitted. The three attorneys presented 6,181 signatures on
a petition requesting that the film be banned. After a brief closed-door ses¬
sion the committee ruled to permit the film’s showing, and it enjoyed a run
of unprecedented length. Curley biographer Jack Beatty suggests that the
mayor was paid off by the film’s distributors, his prudishness overruled by his
pecuniary instinct. 58

BI RACIAL COOPERATION AND AFRICAN-AMERICAN LEADERSHIP

The relation of African-Americans to the national and Boston NAACP un¬
derwent a powerful transformation during the association’s first decade. If
white NAACP leaders projected a biracial organization, Monroe Trotter saw,
not without some justice, a white organization—an ally perhaps, but also a
potential rival within the black community. In Boston, the NAACP re¬
mained largely white until the aftermath of the world war, when about two
thousand African-Americans took out membership cards for the civil rights
organization. While these were largely paper memberships, the composition
of the organization was transformed. This process was unique to Boston,
which alone had a preponderance of white members and leaders in the associ¬
ation’s first decade. As the older white abolitionists died or retired, African-
Americans made the organization their own. This was probably the first time
in American history that a white-initiated organization became largely Afri¬
can-American. The process reflected at once the new postwar assertiveness
of African-Americans, and the continuing retreat of whites from the civil
rights movement. Broader developments such as the Great Migration and
postwar disillusionment contributed to this process nationally. In Boston,
African-Americans were attracted to the NAACP because of its consistent
hard work on behalf of civil rights. Nevertheless, for the first decade of its
existence, race relations between the NAACP and the black community, and
within the NAACP, were a vexed question that challenged the members and
leaders as they sought to forge an organizational identity.

Underlying this dilemma was the notion shared by many NAACP leaders
of both races that before long the association must be led by African-Ameri-

Boston’s NAACP, 1909-1920 153

cans. Nevertheless, there was disagreement over what this meant and at what
pace it should develop. In the national office, W. E. B. Du Bois’s insistence
upon the autonomy of the Crisis magazine crystallized the conflict over this
problem. Backed by a minority of board members and championed within
the office only by Mary White Ovington, he clashed with the supercilious
Oswald Garrison Villard during 1915 and 1916. While the dispute focused
upon organizational matters, the deeper question was over how to achieve
African-American leadership. This was no simple matter: Du Bois was the
obvious candidate, yet he was temperamentally ill-equipped as an organizer.
May Childs Nerney and Joel Spingarn saw the need for black control of the
organization, but they too were mindful of Du Bois’s weaknesses. The
NAACP was not polarized strictly along racial lines, but disputes between
social radicals and conservatives, staff members and board members, journal¬
ists and administrators, could carry racial overtones. The tensions produced
frayed nerves and staff turnover. 59

Boston NAACP leaders tried during 1915 to resolve the problems in the
divided national office. Butler Wilson and his friend Archibald Grimke,
leader of the Washington, D.C., branch, urged reconciliation upon the dispu¬
tants. Boston and Washington were the largest branches throughout the dec¬
ade. Wilson and Grimke, attorneys who worked together as editors of the
Hub , Boston’s black community newspaper in the mid-i88os, lacked the
unique brilliance of Du Bois, but did possess the diplomatic skills necessary
to build an organization. Both grappled with the question of black leadership
of the association without yielding to sentiment or personal ambition. 60
Grimke was elected to the national board before Wilson, and then proposed
his friend for board membership in 1914. Joseph Prince Loud, the vice presi¬
dent of the Boston branch and another national board member, favored
Grimke for national chairman. So did May Childs Nerney, who wrote weekly
confidential letters to Grimke, apprising him in anxious terms of the leader¬
ship crisis in New York. 61

When Du Bois alluded to the leadership problems in a public speech in
Boston during December 1914, Butler Wilson worriedly related this to
Grimke. Du Bois, “in an otherwise very able speech,” Wilson complained,
had virtually accused the national board of acting undemocratically. “These
remarks have caused much concern here and people are talking now about the
division in our ranks. . .. Du Bois may be courting public favor preparatory to
the annual meeting in February. Certainly he is without tact and at times
does some very stupid things.” 62

Wilson was likely reflecting a variety of pressures. The NAACP was still a
new enterprise, not old enough to be sure of continued existence. It faced the

154 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

Scylla of Booker Washington’s opposition and, in Boston, the Charybdis of
Monroe Trotter; both camps hoped to see the new vessel smash upon the
rock of failed biracial cooperation. Du Bois’s airing of dirty laundry might be
seen as admirable frankness; Wilson apparently thought it gave comfort to
the association’s rivals. Additionally, Wilson was a longtime friend of Francis
Jackson Garrison, whose alliance with his nephew against Du Bois was mani¬
fest. These considerations aside, Wilson and Grimke were organization men
who knew that compromise and discretion were the necessary oils for a
smooth-running machine.

May Childs Nerney feared some sort of coup within the organization and
advised Grimke that the “Morgan-Hare” clique of malcontents in the Boston
branch were echoing Du Bois’s charge that the association was not run demo¬
cratically. “How many Boston people can Wilson get to come [to the 1915
annual meeting] to counter-act the [Clement] Morgan-[Maud Cuney] Hare
clique?” she anxiously pressed Grimke. Morgan and Du Bois were indeed on
good terms. Du Bois remembered Morgan fondly in his final autobiography
but omitted Wilson. Morgan was clearly out of favor with branch president
Garrison. During the Birth of a Nation controversy Garrison wrote with dis¬
gust about Morgan’s speech during Mayor Curley’s hearing. It is not likely
that he was merely being factional, for in the same letter he praised Trotter,
whom he heartily detested. 63

One year later when Villard and Joel Spingarn proposed to resign their
leadership positions, Wilson urged Spingarn to stay on. He also appealed to
Du Bois to patch up his differences with Villard and grow into the role that
history seemed to have destined for him. “It is now possible for you to have
the power and great influence of both the Association and The Crisis with
you. . . . Everybody concedes your mental equipment. Not so many concede
your ability to lead men. Why has not your time come? . . . The colored
people are ready to follow a big man.” Du Bois knew himself better. Thank¬
ing Wilson for his kind words, he regretted that he and Villard could not
even speak to each other. “There is no use of me trying to be a leader of men.
I am a writer and a critic, but I do not easily make friends.” 64 The leadership
crisis in the organization during 1915-16 was not fully resolved until James
Weldon Johnson became the first African-American national secretary in
1920. Throughout the decade, members of the Boston branch grappled with
the question of what sort of organization they were building. Was the
NAACP to be a biracial organization, or should it appeal to the growing
sentiments of racial pride among black people and become a “race organiza¬
tion?” This problem has appeared in almost every civil rights organization
since then, and the Boston NAACP members were among the first to grapple

Boston’s NAACP, 1909-1920 155

with its implications. From 1909 to 1920, when blacks and whites virtually
never met as equals, the question was even more overwhelming than it is
today. As the white Boston NAACP members noted the increasingly black
composition of the national and local organization, they wondered what it
meant. The most troubled of the members was George G. Bradford, the
branch treasurer throughout the decade, whose resignation in 1920 may have
been motivated by this concern.

Bradford’s wider views were informed by his analysis of the South. He
saw the region in a schematic but long-term perspective, viewing it as still
demoralized by the devastation of the Civil War. The South, as the defeated
party, could usefully be compared to France after her defeat in the Franco-
Prussian War. Bradford thought there was a “Law of Deferred Results”: that
is, the defeated party in war required a generation or two to recover itself,
during which time it turned to recrimination and hatred. “The low point for
the French was the Dreyfus case,” he wrote to Archibald Grimke. Just as the
French had recovered their vigor, he suggested hopefully, the South was due
to recover its senses in a few years. 65 Without saying so directly, he implied
that as the French had seen their error, restored Dreyfus, and rebuked the
anti-Semites, so too would the South restore full rights to African-Ameri¬
cans.

This optimistic outlook regarding the ability of white southerners to halt
their racist practices framed Bradford’s concern that the NAACP not become
strictly a race organization. When the American entry into the world war
unleashed a storm of chauvinism that cast suspicion upon any loyalties to
one’s ethnic origins, Bradford’s apprehension grew. “The American people
are not going to have much patience now or later with hyphenated Ameri¬
cans—whether German-Americans or Irish-Americans or colored-Ameri-
cans,” he wrote to James Weldon Johnson during an NAACP membership
drive. “Appeals to race loyalty are going to be looked upon with increasing
suspicion. In making our great membership drive therefore it becomes in¬
creasingly important to make our appeals to the principles of American citi¬
zenship—of civil liberty rather than to the racial sympathies of colored people
and their friends.” 66

Were these principles genuinely counterposed or could they be made to
work in harmony? James Weldon Johnson did not see a contradiction be¬
tween these two impulses. Granting Bradford’s point in a general way, he
reminded the Bostonian that if colored people organized on the basis of racial
pride, it was only for the purpose of winning full citizenship. 67

Bradford was somewhat unsatisfied with this explanation one year later,
but his awareness of the role for racial self-organization had grown. In a letter

156 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

to Du Bois he contrasted “race organization to develop racial self-respect,
self-confidence, capacity for leadership and organization/’ to “organization
for civil liberty for promoting just and friendly relations between races and
classes.” Both were necessary, but the NAACP, he averred, should stand for
the latter principle, although it would be “very difficult ... to prevent the
NAACP becoming a race organization .” 68

How to do this in an America that was relentlessly hostile to black aspira¬
tions? Bradford raised this problem with John ShiUady, a white staff member
in New York. A few months later Shillady was brutally beaten by Texas racists
in front of the state capitol at Austin while on assignment for the association,
and when he resigned shortly afterward it underscored the problem. Bradford
proposed that branches strive for at least a 10 percent white membership. “As
our organization is now made up racial in name and preponderantly racial in
membership and purpose—its growth in numbers will inevitably arouse and
intensify race distrust and race prejudice—not allay it. . . . Mr. Storey and I
argue that we should have branches in states having few if any colored people
for the principles for which we stand are national not racial.” Later he was
careful to qualify his argument by insisting that it was based “not on any
theory that one race is more important than the other but on the theory that
both races are important and should cooperate.” 69

Storey in general concurred with this approach, albeit without the numeri¬
cal schema that accompanied much of Bradford’s thinking. In October 1918
he wrote the national office that more organizing should be done in primarily
white states. To Storey, though, this was not a bad problem to have. “I think
the situation is improving, and is nothing more than the growing self-confi¬
dence of the colored people and their willingness to assert their rights.” 70

To a certain extent, Bradford’s frame of mind reflected the paternalist im¬
pulse uncomfortable with the independence of its prodigy. This sensibility
was shared by other whites in the association and can be seen in Garrison’s
confidences to his nephew. In a particularly revealing passage, Garrison ex¬
pressed his hope for a large attendance at a meeting: “Tonight another meet¬
ing will be held at the West Newton colored church. ... I believe the colored
people will yet wake up and help us.” Incredibly, Garrison seemed to have
reversed in his own mind who was giving “help” to whom. Nine months
later, he expressed similar frustration: “I hope we shall be able to muster a
respectable audience, but one can never count upon the colored people in
such matters. Trotter understands them when he gets up a dancing entertain¬
ment to raise funds to send him to Washington!” It is easy to condemn
such paternalism today, but Progressive Era attitudes should not be judged
ahistorically. Almost everyone at the time believed that racial characteristics,

Boston’s NAACP, 1909-1920 157

either inherited, learned, or both, determined behavior. And the NAACP
activists were the most advanced whites on racial matters; no one else’s ideas
better pointed to the future. Even Trotter sometimes expressed the impa¬
tience that Garrison showed; frustration is an occupational hazard for leaders
of protest movements, which ebb and flow in tidal currents that no individual
leader can control. The irony of Garrison’s concern is that within a few years
his colleague Bradford was worried about the opposite phenomenon—that
too few whites participated in the movement . 71

As previously noted, the transformation in the racial composition of the
Boston NAACP and the association nationally was rooted in the Great
Migration northward beginning around 1915, with its concomitant urbaniza¬
tion and proletarianization of the race. The participation of African-Ameri¬
can troops in the world war and the death of Booker Washington in 1915
further undermined the accommodationist perspective. These interrelated
phenomena raised great hopes in the African-American population and
quickly dashed them as migrants and returning troops were met by a blizzard
of white violence. The “New Negro” who appeared at the end of the war
built not only a cultural Harlem Renaissance, but also a new political organi¬
zation to defend black people against these attacks.

Action would not mean much to the association unless the sentiment be¬
hind it was organized, and it launched two membership drives toward the
end of the decade. The success of these campaigns was facilitated not only by
the deterioration in race relations, but also by the collapse of the association’s
competitors for membership. Booker Washington’s following gradually dis¬
solved after his unexpected death in November 1915, facilitating a transfer of
loyalties to the NAACP by such prominent individuals as James Weldon
Johnson. Trotter by 1919 was disoriented; in that year he was pursuing his
quixotic one-man crusade at the Paris Peace Conference while the NAACP
was mobilizing the huge antilynching campaign.

The Boston NAACP leaders had always been diplomatic in their approach
to Washington’s milieu. As early as June 1910 they convinced Bookerite law
partners James H. Wolff and Edward Everett Brown to serve on the national
board. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and Maria Baldwin, leaders of the African-
American women’s movement, at various times were members of the local
executive committee but still maintained their distance from the NAACP, in
part for obscure personal reasons. At one meeting, Ruffin insulted Butler
Wilson so severely that he threatened to resign. “It is the old story of jealousy
.. . against Mr. and Mrs. Wilson, who have been the real life of our organiza¬
tion,” Francis Jackson Garrison mournfully reported to his nephew. 72

While Ruffin and Baldwin have been properly remembered by historians,

158 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

Mary Evans Wilson has unfortunately been forgotten. She was undoubtedly
the central recruitment organizer for the NAACP in New England, and
probably the most important individual in the transformation of the Boston
branch from a white-led organization to a black community institution. In
the fall of 1914 and the winter of 1915 she delivered a speech entided “Race
Discrimination and Segregation at the Capitol” in Providence, New Bedford,
several Ohio cities, and in western Pennsylvania. She would meet in parlors
or churches with local activists and leave town, hurriedly writing requests that
one hundred membership cards be sent to a new member in Columbus, that
some white supporters had come to the meeting in Dayton, or that Joel
Spingarn’s speech in Pittsburgh was being well publicized. Her brief missives,
probably written aboard a bouncing train, are reminiscent of traveling aboli¬
tionists working the same territory eighty years earlier. In the fall of 1915 she
spoke in Springfield, New Bedford again, and Maine and New Hampshire.
Butler Wilson complained humorously to Archibald Grimke that he intro¬
duced himself to his wife on her occasional returns home. Mary Wilson was
the unsung heroine of the Boston NAACP, rarely taking center stage in
Boston (although she did speak at the huge 1915 meeting) but quietly winning
thousands of new recruits to the organization. 73

By the winter of 1918, the Boston branch was still the largest nationally,
with 753 members; St. Louis was next, with 615. After the NAACP won a
residential segregation case in the Supreme Court in the fall of 1917, Moor-
field Storey called for a membership drive to capitalize on the victory. By the
summer of 1918, the Boston branch had won 1,800 new members, for a total
of 2,553. In 1920, Boston’s African-American population was only 16,350,
which meant that Boston had approximately one NAACP member for every
six black people. The Washington, D.C., branch grew to 6,906 but its black
population in 1910 was 94,446. Boston’s NAACP was still second in absolute
size. New York was third with 1,237 members with a black population roughly
equal to Washington’s. By 1919 Boston issued its own branch bulletin and
reported 3,300 members, “and this drive is due to add another 1,000.” Un¬
doubtedly the vast majority of this number were only paper members, but the
recruitment drives did show that the NAACP had a great deal of support. 74

The NAACP did not keep racial statistics on members, but the likelihood
is that locally and nationally these members were overwhelmingly African-
American. Mary Wilson and a Dr. John J. Smith headed the recruitment
committee and won new members by going door to door, and visiting church
and club meetings. A furniture salesman turned in 95 membership cards, and
Wilson’s knitting classes produced 300 new female members. A Christian
endeavor society yielded 43 recruits, and a Methodist Sunday school 176. By

Boston’s NAACP, 1909-1920 159

1920 there were separate committees in the neighboring towns of Cambridge,
Everett, and Lynn. “There are two score race groups in Boston, 17 are repre¬
sented in the Branch,” the local bulletin reported . 75

One sign that the association was taking root in the African-American
community was the participation of a new group of ministers in its leadership.
The Reverend Samuel A. Brown was briefly a member of the branch execu¬
tive committee before moving to Ohio in 1919. Brown was pastor of St.
Mark’s Congregational Church. In 1912, the pastorate of the Columbus Ave.
AME Church, scene of the 1903 Trotter-Washington confrontation, went to
Benjamin W. Swain, an NAACP member. Branch president Joseph Loud
spoke at a testimonial for Swain in 1918. At People’s Baptist, Aaron Puller,
who was arrested with Trotter during the Birth of a Nation controversy, was
replaced by David S. Klugh, who participated in the NAACP recruitment
drive. 76

Over the course of a decade, the NAACP had transformed itself from an
organization of white people linked to the antislavery crusade to an institu¬
tion within the African-American community. If it could not maintain itself
as a genuinely biracial organization after 1920, it did a better job of achieving
that goal than any other American organization. As the Garrisons, Storeys,
and Pillsburys died out, they were replaced by African-American activists
who kept the struggle alive until the significant victories of the modern civil
rights movement. Thus the unique historical tradition of Boston contributed
powerfully to crafting the national response to racism during the nadir of
African-American history.

John Boyle O’Reilly. Courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum.

SIX

Irish-Americans and the
Legacy of John Boyle O’Reilly

Thus far, we have considered the efforts of various reformers to focus the
attention of Boston and the nation upon the race question. To understand
more fully why their successes were limited, we need to consider the wider
context in which they operated. Boston changed dramatically from 1890 to
1920, and the major transformation was the shift in power from the Protes¬
tant Yankee elite to the rising Irish-Americans.

Toward the end of our period, James Michael Curley was mayor, the mili¬
tant Catholic William O’Connell was cardinal, and in 1919 Boston’s largely
Irish police force was on strike. Confrontation between the sons of Irish
Catholic immigrants and the declining Brahmin aristocracy was the order of
the day. In addition, the city and the country were modernizing, and the
institutions of party, church, and union were becoming more centralized, as
were all American institutions.

What this meant for the race reformers was that the matter of civil rights
for African-Americans now seemed to belong to another time and another
place. The city was turning inward upon itself, struggling over how and by
whom it should be ruled, how the religious denominations would regard each
other, and what the relation between labor and capital would be. By 1920, the
Boston that once thought of itself as the Hub of the Universe was increas¬
ingly a provincial center whose Puritan past now was evoked not against a
sinning slavocracy, but against apparently corrupt Irish politicians, assertive
priests, and rebellious workers.

While the Yankee-Irish conflict was at center stage, the picture was com¬
plicated by a significant influx of “new immigrants” from czarist Russia and
southern Europe as Poles, Lithuanians, Jews, and Italians were setting down
roots. There were, for example, 40,000 Jews in Boston by 1910, as compared

162 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

to only 16,000 African-Americans in 1920. The Catholics among these new
immigrants competed within the church for resources and autonomy; the
non-Catholics were busy building their own institutions. Nor was the city a
roiling mass of hostile European tribes. The new immigrants were working
long days (sometimes together), learning English at night, and becoming
fellow Bostonians by cheering for the World Series champion (1903, 1912,
1915,1916, and 1918) Red Sox and their promising pitcher Babe Ruth at Fen¬
way Park, which opened in 1912. Jim Crow was not much on the minds of
many white people.

Indeed, to many Bostonians of our period, the “race question” might mean
what to do about the Irish, the Italians, or the Jews. Yet, the position of the
Irish was clearly different. By 1920, four Irishmen had served as mayor for a
total of sixteen years. They were well integrated into the body politic nation¬
ally, and they alone of the immigrants had an important voice in a national
political party. Black Bostonians had to wonder what this meant for them,
and their people nationally.

Northern Irish-Americans did have a particular antipathy to reform in
general that went back to the antebellum period. They had been hostile to
African-Americans and to abolition, seeing it as a middle-class reform move¬
ment aimed in part at their own behavior. However, that Boston's Irish-
American political, clerical, and trade union leaders would be unresponsive
to African-American aspirations was not a foregone conclusion. Two interre¬
lated aspects of the Irish and Irish-American experience suggested that Bos¬
ton’s Irish-American leaders might be particularly interested in the fate of
African-Americans. In Ireland before the famine, the central leader of Cath¬
olic Emancipation, Daniel O’Connell, was enthusiastically antislavery. In
both Ireland and America, the Irish were, like black Americans, oppressed
because of their nationality (or “race” as people of that time said) and conse¬
quently were thrust to the bottom rungs of the economy. Both groups had
been scorned; both were poor.

Historians of Irish immigration describe three periods of that experience:
the pre-famine Irish, who were not necessarily Catholic and whose presence
was not especially problematic; the famine Irish of 1846-51, who were the
poorest of the Catholics; and a postfamine migration of the late nineteenth
century by more traditional economic migrants. The experience of national
oppression in Ireland, under which Catholic rights were severely curtailed,
coupled with the knowledge that the famine was in part man-made by British
policy, dominated the Irish-American memory for at least a century and lin¬
gers to this day. Like Boston’s African-Americans, the Boston Irish were

The Legacy of John Boyle O’Reilly 163

refugees from another land, where the bulk of their people lived under the
domination of an alien nationality.

In addition, the Boston Irish of 1890 to 1920 had the recent memory and
sometimes the current experience of economic discrimination at the hands of
Boston’s Brahmins to remind them of the plight of others. Similarly, they
suffered the indignity of nativist cultural or physical assault. The large Irish-
American and the small African-American population occupied the lower
and lowest rungs of the working class. Boston advertisements read “No Irish
Need Apply” and factory managers and store owners refused to hire black
workers. Was there not some ground to anticipate a commonality of interest,
given these partial similarities of experience?

More than any other Irish-American of his day, John Boyle O’Reilly ex¬
pressed these possibilities. During a life forged in the Irish revolutionary
struggle, he came to Boston in 1870 as a political exile and poet. He gradually
reclaimed Daniel O’Connell’s vision, but when he died in 1890, the light of
“green” and black unity flickered and died. The earlier hostility toward Afri¬
can-Americans by the Boston Irish became a generalized indifference.

Boston’s African-Americans, however, were not indifferent toward the
Irish. In part, the black community modeled itself on the cultured Brahmin
establishment. On the other hand, William Monroe Trotter, the central
leader of the black community from about 1904 to 1915, held up the example
of Irish revolutionary struggle in Ireland as a model for black militance. In
addition, Trotter was a political independent who often voted Democratic,
thus removing an important barrier between himself and Irish-Americans.
Trotter, as editor of his own newspaper, appealed to the Boston Irish to
remember Daniel O’Connell and John Boyle O’Reilly, but with little success.
Boston’s Irish-Americans forgot the lives of these antiracist campaigners as
they achieved institutional power in the city . 1

Ireland’s antislavery tradition and the boston irish

Viewed retrospectively, Daniel O’Connell was the Martin Luther King of
Irish politics. Born in 1775 to a Catholic small landholder, he employed the
tactics of peaceful mass mobilization, eloquent rhetoric, and parliamentary
struggle to remove legal disabilities from an oppressed people. He lived to
see his cause triumph when in 1829 Britain repealed many anti-Catholic laws.
O’Connell did not question the fundamental underpinnings of British soci¬
ety; he wanted Englishmen to live up to the promise of their history by
permitting Irish self-government under a constitutional monarchy. Like
King, he died during a time of profound economic upheaval (the famine

164 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

years) when the deeper relations between oppressed and oppressor exploded
into the open; both moved at the end of their careers to address those more
fundamental problems. The support by Americans of Irish descent for
O’Connell’s program was the first political movement by Irishmen as such in
America, and this shaped their identities as newly made “Irish-Americans.” 2

O’Connell was a nationalist who detested oppression everywhere, includ¬
ing that of black slaves. In Parliament, West Indian planters offered O’Con¬
nell a bloc: Irish support of slavery in exchange for their support of Catholic
emancipation. O’Connell turned them down. New England antislavery activ¬
ists sent Charles Lenox Remond, an African-American, to Ireland, and he
returned with 60,000 Irish signatures on an antislavery petition addressed to
the American Irish. 3

To this appeal the Irish-Americans were notoriously cool. Historian
George Potter argues convincingly that cultural factors underlay this re¬
sponse. Irish-American opposition to antislavery was located in their general
hostility to the wider Protestant crusade to change individual behavior. Irish-
Catholic leaders especially saw Protestant reform as a rebuke to Catholic
belief and to Irish cultural values. Temperance, women’s rights, the encroach¬
ments of an all-powerful state upon the individual’s domain, and antislavery
became linked in the Irish mind with nativist outrages against themselves.
The loyalty of the Irish to the Democratic Party as champion of the working¬
man meshed with “anti-abolitionist” sensibilities. Potter assigns to a second¬
ary place Irish competition with blacks for jobs, suggesting that this victory
the Irish had decisively won virtually upon arrival. Finally, Catholic “fatalism”
viewed slavery as a natural disaster about which little could be done but to
trust in God. 4

The antipathy of Boston’s Irish-Americans toward abolitionists carried
over to the Negro. Francis R. Walsh traces the unfolding of this sentiment in
a study of the Boston Pilot. This was an Irish immigrant journal from its
founding in 1829 by Patrick Donahoe, until 1908, when it became the organ
of the Catholic archdiocese. Potter described it as the “best of the [unofficial]
Catholic Irish weeklies and the most representative of Catholic Irish think¬
ing” in the antebellum period. He suggests that the Pilot was more anti¬
abolitionist than proslavery, but Walsh more convincingly shows that its
“steady course in opposing the abolitionists, a designation of seemingly inex¬
haustible elasticity” reflected racist and proslavery sensibilities. 5

The Pilot viewed slavery as an institution having biblical sanction and
therefore not as an evil in and of itself. How to make slavery a workable
institution, or to let it die of natural causes, was best left to the slaveholders
who understood the problem. Antislavery advocates were hypocrites who

The Legacy of John Boyle O’Reilly 165

countenanced the oppression of the Irish and the workingman in America
generally. American abolitionists were dupes of the British, who freed their
Negro slaves while allowing Irishmen to perish in the famine. As the Civil
War approached, the Pilot supported slavery in the nation’s capital, the rendi¬
tion of fugitive slaves Thomas Sims and Anthony Burns, the Kansas-Ne-
braska Act, the Dred Scott decision, and Stephen Douglass in the i860
election. On occasion, the newspaper referred to black people as “niggers.” 6
The Pilot essentially presented the argument of the slavocracy and sugar-
coated it with Irish nationalism.

When the Civil War broke out, the Pilot reluctantly condemned secession,
blaming the abolitionists for provoking the crisis. Donahoe supported the
war to defend the union, and backed Irish-American participation as a dem¬
onstration of patriotism. He soured on the war effort with the Emancipation
Proclamation, predicting that the slaves would not leave the plantation, for
“they love their masters as dogs do.” Faced with this ultimate test, the Pilot
showed that it supported slavery in practice, and now turned against Presi¬
dent Abraham Lincoln. The Pilot declared Negroes to be an inferior race,
and the draft to be an anti-Irish measure. When officials enforced the draft
law, an Irish mob attacked the armory and seven rioters were killed. 7

In the aftermath of the war, the Pilot stressed the positive contribution of
Irish-American soldiers to victory, and celebrated the outcome of the war.
The unity wrought by mutual participation on the battlefield carried over for
a while, diminishing the local Brahmin-Yankee antagonism. Within a few
years, however, the Pilot denounced Reconstruction as a project of Republi¬
can nativists. It dismissed claims of antiblack violence in the South as fraudu¬
lent. 8

Meanwhile, relations between Boston’s Irish- and African-Americans were
influenced by internal developments within the Irish national struggle. The
O’Connell tradition alternately competed and coexisted with the revolution¬
ary Irish Republican movement, typified by such martyrs as Wolfe Tone and
Robert Emmett. These leaders favored the establishment of an independent
republic by methods of physical force, eschewing parliamentary struggle. The
Irish Republicans also spoke less than the O’Connell tendency did about
slavery, in part because their movement was shaped more from American
exile. Further, the American “Fenians” were militarized by their experience as
Civil War combatants. This contributed to their reckless decision to “invade”
Canada in 1866 and 1870, and the subsequent collapse of their movement. 9

1870 was also the year that John Boyle O’Reilly, a famed Irish Republican
political prisoner and budding poet, arrived in Boston. Born in 1844 to edu¬
cated parents, he became a revolutionary by age nineteen, and joined a plot

166 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

to infiltrate the British Army and spark a mutiny. He was captured, court-
martialed and sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to hard
labor and Australian exile. O’Reilly made a daring escape, came to Philadel¬
phia and then New York, and decided that Boston was the place for him . 10

With the aid of fellow Fenians Dr. Robert Dwyer Joyce and Patrick A.
Collins, O’Reilly became a writer for the Pilot. He covered the 1870 Canadian
expedition and then the “Orange” riots in New York. These public-relations
disasters for the Irish-American community, and the assumptions underlying
Irish-Catholic militance that they displayed, caused him to rethink the course
of Irish-American nationalism. Shortly thereafter the Great Boston Fire of
1872 and the depression of 1873 reduced the Pilot's owner financially, and
Archbishop John J. Williams and O’Reilly became owners of the Pilot } 1

O’Reilly began to wonder if some rapprochement with the O’Connell tra¬
dition was now in order. A complex process of reevaluation carried O’Reilly
and his colleagues through various organizations such as Clan na Gael and
the Land League, but it generally moved them toward the parliamentary
struggle for Home Rule that Charles Stewart Parnell would advance in the
1880s, in problematic alliance with the English Liberal leader William E.
Gladstone. O’Reilly and his friends were now moderates under the broad
philosophical influence of O’Connell. 12

Closer to home, O’Reilly was living in the same city as Wendell Phillips,
one of the few abolitionists who also cared about the Irish and labor ques¬
tions. Backed by militant shoemakers, Phillips ran for governor on an Inde¬
pendent ticket the year O’Reilly arrived in Boston. These two revolutionaries
were men of similar spirit who had known scorn and isolation, but by the
1870s were enjoying respectability. On O’Connell’s centennial in 1875 they
addressed four thousand Bostonians, celebrating the Liberator in prose and
poem. Along with them were Governor William Gaston, General Nathaniel
Banks, Father James A. Healy (an African-American), Archbishop Williams,
and others. Ethnically and politically this was an ecumenical gathering rather
than an Irish Catholic celebration. Phillips was the main orator, and O’Reilly
recited his “A Nation’s Test,” a hymn to Ireland and its heroes, and to the
brotherhood of all the oppressed. The Boston Evening Transcript praised the
“fiery young Boyle O’Reilly, as good a representative specimen of pure Celtic
stock as Wendell Phillips is of straight English lineage.” This public celebra¬
tion thus ratified the coming together of the Irish and Brahmin antislavery
traditions, with the blessing of the archbishop and the staid Transcript , 13

O’Reilly was shaped by the currents of working-class radicalism that
gained ground in the turbulent late 1880s. Although he generally described
himself as a “Jeffersonian Democrat,” he was also attracted to notions of

The Legacy of John Boyle O’Reilly 167

Christian socialism. He flirted with Edward Bellamy’s Nationalism, wrote a
sympathetic obituary for Karl Marx, and argued for the militant union the
Knights of Labor. He supported Single Taxer Henry George’s New York
mayoralty campaign in 1886, but turned against him when George later at¬
tacked the Catholic Church. This broader radical framework informed his
outlook on race relations. 14

He was also a committed Democrat. This posed an obstacle for his rela¬
tions with Boston’s generally Republican black community. Some black Bos¬
tonians, however, were Independents, such as Archibald Grimke and James
Trotter, father of future editor William Monroe Trotter. In December 1885,
O’Reilly addressed the Massachusetts Colored League, which had recently
resolved in favor of political independence. O’Reilly looked for points of
commonality between the Irish and black struggles. “I don’t care whether you
vote the Republican or Democratic ticket,” he said, “but I know that if I were
a colored man I should use parties as I would a club—to break down preju¬
dices against my people.” O’Reilly, however, remained a Democrat, and the
differing orientations could not entirely be wished away. 15

In this speech O’Reilly sounded themes that no Brahmin abolitionist, not
even Wendell Phillips, could match. O’Reilly was himself born to a people
suffering national oppression. He had been a revolutionary, a soldier, a politi¬
cal prisoner, and he was an exile. Perhaps more important, he was a poet.
Even as he gained respectability in Boston, these experiences gave him an
empathy for the black struggle that was unique among whites. Ultimately,
O’Reilly said, the white man’s bigotry was at the heart of the race question,
and that would only break down as the colored people built their own culture.
Therefore the Negro must be true to his African roots, rather than a student
of the white people. This flew in the face of progressive white teaching,
which was generally paternalistic and stressed that the Negro was making
great strides by emulating white society. “In his heart still ring the free sounds
of the desert,” O’Reilly enthused about the Negro. “In his mind he carries
the traditions of Africa. . . . Inside he is a new man, fresh from nature.”
O’Reilly, a Byronesque Romantic, celebrated the Negro as “the only Ameri¬
can who has written new songs and composed new music,” who would soon
bring forth poets and philosophers whose accomplishments would break
down the barriers of prejudice. 16

A few months later, Boston’s African-American leaders again invited
O’Reilly to speak at a protest meeting after a massacre of unarmed blacks in
Mississippi. A large audience gathered at the Twelfth Baptist Church, and
the black leaders drew their conclusions about what to do from the lessons of
the Irish struggle. Attorney Edwin G. Walker, son of abolitionist David

168 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

Walker, declared that progress in the Irish movement came only through
violence, and that the colored people in America should learn from that.
Lewis Hayden, who had warded off slave catchers with threats of explosives,
noted the Irish use of dynamite and suggested its possible employment by
black people. O’Reilly was introduced as the successor to Wendell Phillips
(who had died the year before). By now, however, O’Reilly’s urgings were
more cautionary. He agreed with the right of self-defense, and said that Mis¬
sissippi blacks should “meet lawless violence with legal violence.” However,
he advised that the struggle might take one or two generations before achiev¬
ing victory, and drew a rather different conclusion from the Irish example.
He had just come from a meeting at Faneuil Hall, where Irishmen had as¬
sembled to honor an English statesman (probably Gladstone). As a youth he
could not have imagined such a development. Now he urged the protestors
to maintain their dignity, culture, and African roots. These remarks, slightly
out of step with those of the African-American speakers, reflected the differ¬
ing tempos of the Irish and black struggles, the new mood of an older man,
and the growing respectability and power of the Irish in Boston. 17

The dedication of the monument to Crispus Attucks and the other victims
of the Boston Massacre of 1770 brought together the leaders of the black
community, O’Reilly, and Boston’s first Irish-born mayor, Hugh O’Brien.
At this 1888 commemoration, O’Reilly’s poem “Crispus Attucks” linked the
American struggle against the British with the Irish and black struggles in
the person of Attucks, whose sacrifice showed, “There never was separate
heart-beat in all the races of men!” The “blood of the people” wherever they
might be, confronted the same “Patrician, aristocrat, tory—whatever his age
or name,” who was loyal only to his own privileges. 18

By 1890, the importance of the African-American vote in the South took
on national significance as Republicans, possessing the presidency and both
houses of Congress, attempted to pass a Federal Elections bill that would
send federal officials into states where voting irregularities were alleged. Bos¬
ton’s Democratic press, especially Boston’s other Irish newspaper, the Repub¬
lic , campaigned vigorously against the bill. O’Reilly, by marked contrast,
spoke out for civil rights in this period, mentioning his opposition to the
measure only in the most muted of terms. For example, after the murder of
eight black men at Barnwell, South Carolina, he urged the residents to take
up an economic boycott of town merchants, among other tactics. He chas¬
tened an Alabama senator who called for the expulsion of blacks from the
United States. When South Carolina newspapers challenged the tenor of
these pieces, the Pilot replied that lynchers should be hanged, and that segre¬
gation could be turned against northern working-class people. Later that year

The Legacy of John Boyle O’Reilly 169

he defended Clement Morgan, an African-American class orator at Harvard,
from suggestions that Negroes should be barred from such roles. O’Reilly’s
opposition to the Federal Elections bill was limited to two brief editorials,
and one of these stressed his support for Fourteenth Amendment remedies
instead of the Republican bill’s approach. At a time when the Democratic
press was haughtily deprecating the voting rights of African-Americans,
O’Reilly’s record was impressively steadfast in its devotion to the civil rights
cause. 19

O’Reilly died accidentally in August 1890, when he took the wrong medi¬
cation for insomnia. He was universally mourned in moving and generous
tributes in Boston, around New England, and by Irish and church leaders.
Mayor Thomas Hart presided at the Boston memorial meeting, and leaders
of the clerical, journalistic, educational, and literary professions spoke. Edwin
G. Walker represented the African-American community, and Patrick Col¬
lins, later a mayor and O’Reilly’s earliest Boston friend, delivered the final
speech. 20 While O’Reilly was widely remembered for his vision and largeness
of spirit, his commitment to the civil rights movement was quickly forgotten.
In fact, his very prominence as an advocate of civil rights suggests that his
Irish-American contemporaries simply ignored this part of his character
while he lived. The next generation of Irish-American leaders, having less
connection to Ireland and less still to the Irish revolutionary movement,
played more central roles in the history of the city. The southern question
receded, while black people in Boston gradually disappeared from the view
of Boston’s Irish-Americans.

IRISH-AMERICAN DEMOCRATS

A copious historiography discusses the development of Boston’s Irish-Ameri¬
can political culture and its relation to Brahmin Boston in this period. Very
little is written about Irish- and African-American relations within Boston,
or Irish-American attitudes toward the national race question, because little
occurred. Irish-Americans built a rich political culture that sustained three
newspapers, and captured the mayoralty for a century after. This section ex¬
amines what two of those newspapers said about race relations, and selects
two politicians, John F. Fitzgerald and James Michael Curley, to see how
their policies affected the black community. Finally it explores the factors
that diminished O’Reilly’s influence . 21

James Jeffrey Roche was O’Reilly’s contemporary, disciple, and successor
at the Pilot, However, his early life experience was radically different from
O’Reilly’s, his notoriety much less, and the time of his editorship less hospita-

170 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

ble to liberal views on race. He led the newspaper until 1904, resigning after
endorsing Republican Theodore Roosevelt for president.

Like O'Reilly he was born in Ireland, but he grew up on Prince Edward
Island and had no direct connection to the Irish struggle. He was a writer
and journalist rather than an activist. Again like O'Reilly, he was a Catholic,
but he labored under the influence of a more conservative papacy than did
his mentor. Roche remained true to O’Reilly’s vision, but the passion was
missing from his prose. He was one of the best Irish-American spokespersons
for civil rights in this period, but in comparison to O’Reilly his voice was
more restrained. 22

Roche took over the Pilot in the middle of the Federal Elections bill dis¬
pute, and his editorials in opposition to the bill were forceful where O’Reilly’s
had been muted. He described it as a “monstrous scheme” that would “rob
the states of their electoral freedom.” When the Democrats swept to victory
in November, he saw that more as a repudiation of Henry Cabot Lodge and
the “Force Bill” than of William McKinley’s protective tariff. Two years later,
when the Democratic Party began to revive the dead issue for partisan pur¬
poses, Roche wrote more evenhandedly. When Congressman William C. P.
Breckenridge of Kentucky spoke in Boston in February 1892, he urged north¬
erners to let the South work out its own race problem. He called for “No
Force Bill” and “Home Rule” (for the South)—an appeal to Irish sympathies,
for the latter slogan was that of Charles Stewart Parnell for Ireland. Roche
replied that the Pilot had opposed the bill too, but reminded the congressman
that southern violations of Negro voting rights had given the bill’s proponents
their opportunity. Roche conceded that Negroes were inferior to whites, but
not inherently, only because of the legacy of slavery. The colored people could
be raised up by “the missionary, the teacher and the free ballot.” This tepid
defense of African-American voting rights provided no means to enforce
those rights. 23

Roche also departed from O’Reilly’s view that African-Americans would
find their own way, by positing the standard white paternalistic model in this
editorial. O’Reilly said little about missionary work, and stressed the new
culture that black people would create on American soil. Roche was enthusi¬
astic about missionary work, a position he defended against bigots who ar¬
gued that the church should not waste its time or money on an unteachable
race. This was “un-Christian race prejudice,” the Pilot declared when a South
Carolina Catholic paper voiced this opinion. Roche was a liberal on the race
question who nontheless lacked O’Reilly’s advanced understanding of black
pride and militance. 24

He wrote against racist violence, condemning the Virginia legislature for

The Legacy of John Boyle O’Reilly 171

proposing a public whipping post in 1898, and two years later against urban
mobbists in New York and New Orleans. He linked the imperialist adventure
in the Philippines and Puerto Rico to the spread of lynching sentiment. At
the same time he condemned “the professional ‘friend of the black man’
[who] is the same now as he was in carpet-bag days, on the look-out for
number one first, last and all the time.” This editorial suggested that Recon¬
struction and imperialism were linked Republican projects that equally pro¬
moted white racism. Again, however, Roche suffered only in comparison to
his predecessor, who bluntly called for the hanging of lynchers and generally
supported black self-defense. 25

Behind this retreat from O’Reilly’s militance was the new spirit of the
times and the ascension of Booker T. Washington. Roche’s views were as
compatible with those of Washington as O’Reilly’s were with the ideas of
Wendell Phillips. He sounded the same themes of education, self-help and
accumulation of property as the Tuskegean, without the latter’s public accom¬
modation to segregation and disfranchisement. Roche wrote little about seg¬
regation and, in opposing the grandfather clause, allowed that literacy tests
were reasonable. He praised the National Negro Business League, and Theo¬
dore Roosevelt for inviting Washington to dinner at the White House. When
Monroe Trotter criticized Booker Washington in Boston, Roche naturally
took the educator’s side. 26

As O’Reilly’s disciple and Pilot editor from 1890 to 1904, Roche’s evolution
is most instructive. Historian Thomas N. Brown suggests that O’Reilly’s in¬
somnia, and finally his death, was caused by the tension in his life between
his roots in Irish nationalism and his growing toward Brahmin respectabil¬
ity. 27 Roche compeleted this trajectory, calling for a Republican victory in
1904 and abandoning the editorship. He wound up writing remarkably like
E. H. Clement, editor of the gray and sober Boston Evening Transcript.

By contrast, the Republic, founded in 1882 by the leader of Boston’s Irish
Democrats, Patrick J. Maguire, was unconcerned with black rights. Maguire
was born in 1838 in Ireland, arriving in Boston in 1850 by way of Prince
Edward Island. He learned the printer’s trade, developed interests in real
estate, and apprenticed himself in politics to Michael Doherty, leader of the
Irish Democrats in his day. Maguire prospered, and in the twenty-five years
before his death in 1896 was the most powerful Irish-American leader in
Boston. Except for a minor exception, he did not seek public office, but
worked as a behind-the-scenes manipulator. A self-made man, he followed
Doherty’s strategy of alliance with Yankee Democrats and engineered the
election of Hugh O’Brien, Boston’s first Irish mayor in 1884. The Irish-
American leaders of the Gilded Age provided the votes for Mayors Frederick

172 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

O. Prince, Nathan Matthews, and Josiah Quincy, Governor William E. Rus¬
sell, and President Grover Cleveland. The framework for this arrangement
lasted until the 1893 crash broke Maguire's power and inaugurated the era of
the less tractable ward bosses Martin Lomasney, John F. Fitzgerald, and
James Michael Curley. 28

For a backroom politician of humble origin, Maguire produced a sophisti¬
cated and literate newspaper that covered Ireland and Irish America closely.
His columns carefully dissected complex party alignments in the British Par¬
liament and their meaning for Ireland. Editorials on American or local ques¬
tions invariably included some denunciation of state encroachment upon
Irish-Catholic rights, especially during the anti-parochial school campaign
of the late 1880s and early 1890s, immigration restriction, or high tariffs.
These stories carried the theme of the all-powerful national or local state
against the individual. Democratic opposition to the Federal Elections bill of
1890 fit neatly into this conceptual framework. Of all Bostons Democratic
papers, Maguire’s campaign against the bill was the most shrill. The contrast
with the Pilot was stark. After 1890, civil rights disappeared from the pages
of the RepublicP

The Republic added one new note to the Democratic campaign against the
Federal Elections bill, which was to argue for more liberal voting rights in
the North for immigrants. As long as Irish or other prospective immigrant
voters had to contend with property requirements in Rhode Island, for exam¬
ple, or residency requirements in Massachusetts, it was best to remember the
proverb about those who lived in glass houses. “Let us settle our race differ¬
ences in New England before we would undertake to lecture our Southern
brethren,” concluded one editorial. Other than that, the argument was similar
to that of Democratic dailies like the Globe or Post. Republicans did not
care about Negro rights, wished to centralize power, acted only for partisan
purposes, violated the Constitution, threatened sectional reconciliation and
normal commercial relations. As for the Negro himself, he was treated better
in the South than in the North anyway, and was being used as a tool of
cynical Republican politicians. 30

These arguments were no better or worse than those of Yankee Democrats
against the bill. All suffered from the same simple problem: they ignored the
disfranchisement and attendant violence suffered by the southern African-
American. Maguire’s editorials on this subject show a profound contrast to
those of the Pilot , which told the truth about events in the South, even if it
did not accept the Republican remedy. Maguire did not polemicize with
O’Reilly, and upon his rival editor’s demise the Republics mourning was
heartfelt. 31 The difference in approach to the race question showed the con-

The Legacy of John Boyle O’Reilly 173

trast between the life experience and outlook of O’Reilly and Maguire. The
latter was entirely concerned with his own rise and class standing with his
Yankee allies, and the Irish nationalism of his paper was narrow rather than
universal. His focus was on Boston and its ever-shifting political alliances, a
setting in which African-Americans played a small role. Finally, his lack of
concern for black civil rights was rooted in a conservative worldview that
feared an independent labor movement, new immigrants, women’s suffrage,
and other reforms.

The trend of development in Boston’s Irish newspapers complemented
that of the city’s Democratic politicians. Maguire has been considered here
as an editor, but his death in 1896 and the election that year also mark a
turning point in the institutional life of the Democratic Party. Power now
began to devolve toward neighborhood ward leaders. Josiah Quincy was the
last Yankee mayor to serve more than an interregnum; Patrick Collins was
the last Irish mayor of the Maguire mold (that is, a respectable Cleveland
Democrat). John F. Fitzgerald, who served from 1906 to 1907 and 1910 to
1913, and James Michael Curley (1914-17), the first mayoral native-born sons
of immigrant fathers, set the confrontational tone that would now dominate
Boston politics. 32

That tone was matched by William Monroe Trotter, who emerged as the
leading figure in Boston’s African-American politics around the same time
that Fitzgerald became mayor. Temperamentally, the two men were oppo¬
sites: Fitzgerald, the merry ladies’ man, showy politician, and singer of senti¬
mental songs; Trotter, the unsmiling abstinence man for whom the smallest
question could be elevated to a matter of principle. There were, however,
similarities. Both were second-generation Bostonians consciously represent¬
ing a sometimes scorned group; both were editors of weekly newspapers
(Fitzgerald took over the Republic in 1900 and Trotter launched the Guardian
the following year); and while Trotter was the more uncompromising about
his views, Fitzgerald at least had a sense of decency and fair play. Trotter
campaigned for Fitzgerald every time he ran for mayor. The most important
difference between them was that Fitzgerald represented Boston’s rising
Irish-Americans and Trotter represented Boston’s activist black community
during the nadir of the African-American experience.

Fitzgerald proved to be the most responsive Irish-American politician of
his day toward black aspirations. However, it is difficult to determine to what
extent his actions represented mere vote-getting and to what extent they
represented genuine sentiment. Boston’s black population was too small to
merit much attention, and too unimportant to warrant pandering to racist
sentiment—the very language for that did not yet exist in northern big cities

174 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

until the Great Migration. Nevertheless, votes were votes, and Fitzgerald was
the most energetic campaigner the city had ever seen. He attained political
prominence in 1894 by defeating Joseph O’ Neill, Maguire's man in the U.S.
Congress, thus opening a split in Irish Democratic ranks. To win future elec¬
tions, he would need the support of voters of every nationality, and these he
aggressively pursued throughout his years. At the same time, he did take a
few controversial, if little-noted stands that showed a genuine streak of con¬
cern for black equality. 33

As a congressman, he was one of only three members to support an
amendment to a bill on the size of the House that would reduce southern
representation by twelve seats. Republican Edgar D. Crumpacker of Indiana
proposed to reduce the Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, and North
Carolina delegations because those states disfranchised black voters through
specific constitutional revisions; Crumpacker would marshal the Fourteenth
Amendment against them. Clearly, these would be Democratic seats lost to
the Solid South. Of Crumpacker’s three backers (there were then 356 House
members) Fitzgerald was the only Democrat to speak. He defended the Mas¬
sachusetts election law from unfavorable comparison with the new southern
laws, contrasting the racial bias of the grandfather clause with race-neutral
restrictions in Massachusetts (these were English literacy and one-year resi¬
dency). Denouncing race chauvinism, he praised the valor of black soldiers in
the Spanish-American War, arguing that their sacrifice should count toward
their political rights. As with many legislative attempts to aid African-Ameri¬
cans, the Crumpacker amendment never even came to a vote. Nevertheless,
this unpopular stance by New England’s lone Democrat in Congress suggests
a certain commitment to principle. 34

As mayor of Boston, Fitzgerald took one other difficult stand. His leading
African-American spokesperson in the crucial 1909 campaign was Edward
Everett Brown, an attorney who supported Booker Washington against Trot¬
ter. Along with his law partner James Wolff, Brown organized a colored rally
for Fitzgerald at St. Paul’s Church just before the election. In April, the
victorious Fitzgerald appointed Brown head of the department of weights
and measures; Brown had been Fitzgerald’s assistant health commissioner in
his first term. No black person had been head of a city department before.
Eleven employees at weights and measures now threatened to resign, explic¬
itly because of Brown’s race. Fitzgerald threatened to fire the employees, and
they backed down. A few months later, Wolff delivered the city’s Fourth of
July address. 35

In smaller, symbolic ways, Fitzgerald responded to African-American ini¬
tiatives for recognition. He routinely sent letters of support to Monroe Trot-

The Legacy of John Boyle O’Reilly 175

ter’s protest meetings at Faneuil Hall. When Trotter asked that the city flags
be lowered to commemorate the centennial of abolitionist poet John Green-
leaf Whittier, Fitzgerald complied. Heeding the protests of black citizens, he
convinced a theater manager to withdraw an offensive play, The Clansman ,
from the stage (without actually banning it). He spoke at the NAACP’s na¬
tional convention in Boston in 1911. By these small measures he showed a
regard for fair play and decency. 36

There is much less to be said about the record of James Michael Curley.
His most public act regarding municipal race relations was to disappoint the
black community by refusing to ban The Birth of a Nation from a Boston
movie house. Later, as American entry into the world war approached, he
proposed a segregated unit for local civil defense, to the consternation of
some black Bostonians. On the other hand, he did protest Woodrow Wil¬
son’s segregation of the federal departments, pushed to allow a black veteran
to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery, and supported an antilynching
bill; his 1930s mayoralty included other accomplishments. 37

Boston’s Irish-American politicians, in the period 1890-1920, did not have
a worse record on the race question than Boston’s Yankee politicians, whether
Brahmin Republican or Yankee Democrat. Nor did they lag behind or stand
out from the record of other urban political leaders in the North or Midwest.
That they fell away from the vision of John Boyle O’Reilly is not surprising;
O’Reilly was a dreamer and poet. If these political leaders failed to confront
the southerners on the race question, or failed to include Boston’s small Afri¬
can-American population in the patronage distribution, this was par for the
national course.

Nevertheless, Boston had been different from the rest of the nation, and
to a certain extent remained so until 1920. Boston generated a group of race
reformers who supported African-American education in the South, and later
built the NAACP. Certainly, few prominent white people populated these
movements. Just as certainly, however, none of them were Irish-Americans.
After O’Reilly, there was no Boston Irish analogue to the Yankee reformers,
or to the Jewish NAACP leaders of New York such as Joel and Arthur Sping-
arn. What broader factors limited the development of an alliance, even if a
limited and temporary one, between Boston’s Irish- and African-American
political leaders and activists?

By far the major reason for the separation between these groups was the
marginality of African-Americans to city politics. Comprising about 2 per¬
cent of Boston’s population throughout much of the period, they could not
claim to represent a balance of power between contending Irish-American
factions. That role fell to the city’s “new” European immigrants, such as

176 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

Italians in Fitzgerald's North End, or Jews in Lomasney's West End. African-
Americans clustered increasingly in the South End, led by a lesser figure,
James Donovan. 38

A second factor was the implosion of the national, state, and local Demo¬
cratic Party in the 1890s. In Massachusetts, the party began the decade with
the victory of William E. Russell, a moderate Democrat who served as gover¬
nor from 1890 to 1893. Russell's unifying political influence collapsed under
the impact of the depression of 1893. By 1896, George Fred Williams led
the Yankee Democrats behind William Jennings Bryan, while the Grover
Cleveland Democrats and Independents scattered. The Irish leaders followed
Williams and Bryan out of party loyalty, but split into a separate faction that
was itself split between Maguire’s supporters and the younger ward bosses.
The question of civil rights was never important in a party based on unity
with the South. It completely disappeared in this blizzard of factions. 39

Third, after 1896 the Democratic Party nationally closed down even to
Irish politicians. Bryan's radicalism was well larded with fundamentalism; his
successor as party leader was the stern moralist Woodrow Wilson; and after
1915 the Ku Klux Klan raised its head within the party so that later conven¬
tions hinged on anti-Klan resolutions. The entire atmosphere of the country
turned against black people and part of the backlash extended to the rising
Irish Catholics. Wilson’s racism drove the few blacks in the Democratic Party
back toward the Republicans. After supporting Wilson in 1912 and suffering
a brutal betrayal, African-American Democrats had no more room to maneu¬
ver inside the national Democratic Party. 40

Fourth, the rise of Boston’s ward bosses occurred in a period of economic
prosperity. Boston enjoyed a building boom as the nation recovered at the
end of the century and through most of the next three decades. The economic
radicalism of the mid-i890s disappeared. Local politics in general became
increasingly sterile after 1896. Tariff, currency, civil service reform all mysteri¬
ously disappeared as issues and municipal reform and regulation of trusts
emerged. The ward bosses rose not as spokespersons for particular issues, but
as deliverers of jobs and services to the immigrant poor. Nothing of substance
separated Lomasney, Fitzgerald, and Curley politically except the unending
struggle for power. The civil rights question was above all one of principle.
The politics of the ward bosses, especially in an era of prosperity, was unprin¬
cipled. 41

A fifth conservatizing influence on Boston’s Irish-American political life
was the decreasing importance of the Irish national struggle for American-
born Irish immigrants. The ward bosses lived in a more narrow world than
did their predecessors. Ireland was farther away. One sign of this was the fate

The Legacy of John Boyle O’Reilly 177

of the Republic , which Fitzgerald acquired a few years after Maguire’s death.
In Maguire’s day, the paper was polemical, complex, and full of news from
the struggle in Ireland. Fitzgerald greatly expanded the paper’s circulation by
neutering it. The next generation preferred the women’s pages, words for
young people, and bland homilies to sainted figures that graced Fitzgerald’s
family magazine. The Irish problem was losing its urgency to people who
were building a new culture in America. 42

Finally, American entry into the world war on the side of Britain rendered
Boston’s Irish-Americans more conservative. Curley, for example, was at first
hostile to American participation. Irish nationalism directed against Britain,
such as that expressed in the Easter Rising of 1916, became a complex matter
for patriotic American Irish. As the preparedness bandwagon cranked up, the
uniformity of thought that was ultimately to contribute to the postwar Red
scare closed down the space for social change of any type. O’Reilly could
unite with black Americans behind the figure of Crispus Attucks in his day,
and perhaps find a sympathetic ear among Brahmin American nationalists
intent upon asserting American prerogatives against the British. By 1917, Ire¬
land’s enemy was America’s ally, and the cause of rebellion suffered. Irish-
Americans returned from the war as patriotic members of the American Le¬
gion, but black soldiers came back as embittered New Negroes ready to fight
for their rights. The war widened the cultural gulf between Boston’s Irish-
and African-Americans.

o’reilly’s fading influence in the catholic church

John Boyle O’Reilly’s influence was felt in the religious sphere as well as the
political. He was a practicing Catholic all his life, and he enjoyed the support
of Archbishop John J. Williams of Boston. His radical message of racial
tolerance went out to thousands of Catholics who read the Pilot especially for
its reports of developments within the church. During O’Reilly’s lifetime, the
American Catholic Church was rent between liberal and conservative fac¬
tions. O’Reilly and his successors gave voice to the liberal group. Archbishop
Williams stood between the two camps, probably favoring the liberals. When
he died and William Henry O’Connell succeeded him in 1908, the Pilot fell
into his hands and the conservative faction won. O’Connell consolidated his
power and bureaucratized the church during his long tenure.

The civil rights question played little part in this important process, which
nontheless affected Boston’s race relations. The Catholic Church was differ¬
ent from the Protestant denominations in that it was organized on interracial
lines; there was no independent black Catholic Church. It might have been

178 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

a point of contact between Irish- and African-Americans through which the
broader aspirations of black Bostonians might have been expressed. As in
politics, the small size of Boston’s black Catholic population, combined with
the small number of Catholics in the South, together worked to prevent the
Catholic Church from promoting racial equality in civic life. Again, it was
not a foregone conclusion that events should transpire as they did.

The Church liberals wanted to “Americanize” Catholicism in the new
world. They believed in American democracy and did not fear its influence
on church life. They embraced the doctrines of separation of church and
state, believed that Catholics should freely enter into associations with their
Protestant brethren, and felt that American soil was favorable to the growth
of their religion. They favored Catholic education with a secular tinge and
opposed official condemnation of the militant union the Knights of Labor.
Their leaders were the diplomatic James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore,
whose early career included service in the South, and the more outspoken
Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul, Minnesota. The conservatives were led
by John Cardinal McCloskey of New York, Michael Corrigan, his successor,
and Bishop Bernard McQuaid of Rochester. They simply put a minus where
the liberals placed a plus, favoring the Roman, top-down style of organization
and preferring the classical European arrangement in which the state and
church were mutually interdependent . 43

Archbishop John J. Williams (1822-1908), Boston-born son of an Irish-
immigrant blacksmith, was educated in Boston at Bishop Fenwick’s school,
Montreal, and Paris, and ascended the ecclesiastical ladder, becoming arch¬
bishop in 1866. Modest and retiring by nature, he counseled prudence when
Boston’s Catholics were assailed by nativists in the late 1880s and early 1890s.
Williams’s restraint won him the approbation of Boston’s Brahmin leader¬
ship. In a sense, this relationship paralleled that between Boston’s Irish Dem¬
ocrats and their Yankee allies. Williams thus showed a confidence in the
promise of American life that inclined him toward the church liberals. As a
liberal, he feared that if the church banned the Knights of Labor, the church’s
influence would be weakened among workingmen. On the other hand, Wil¬
liams would not go too far to countenance radicalism. When the conservative
New York leaders chastened Father Edward McGlynn, who supported radical
Henry George in the 1886 mayor’s race in New York, they had Williams’s
support. His sentiments were generally Americanist, but he gave no offense
to the conservatives. Upon Williams’s silver jubilee as a priest, Cardinal Gib¬
bons praised him effusively . 44

In this protective space, O’Reilly, Roche, and Roche’s successor Katherine
Conway infused their readers with modern social opinion. The archbishop

The Legacy of John Boyle O’Reilly 179

had acquired three-fourths interest in the Pilot when founder Patrick Do-
nahoe relinquished control in the 1870s. Williams left the editorial policy to
the lay journalists, who featured the progressive church leaders in the weekly.
On race relations, Cardinal Gibbons was a liberal paternalist who believed in
Booker Washington’s patient approach. Like Washington, he also worked
behind the scenes to foster racial equality; in 1909-10 he helped defeat a
scheme to disfranchise Maryland’s black voters. Archbishop Ireland was more
outspoken. When the national Afro-American League met in his St. Paul
diocese, he condemned segregation, disfranchisement, and all color prejudice.
He opposed proscribing interracial marriage. “I would say let all people in
America be equal socially and politically,” he concluded. In this spirit the
Pilot instructed its readers. Years later, Roche wrote editorially that “Catho¬
lics must give the Negro practical proof of their own faith in the brotherhood
of all for whom Christ died.” 45

Williams himself showed little tangible interest in the question of civil
rights, certainly nothing to match Ireland’s rhetoric or Gibbons’s deeds. He
was a spiritual man who was apparently free of any racial prejudice himself.
Williams promoted the remarkable careers of three black priests: the brothers
Healy, who were born to a Catholic Georgia planter and a former slave.
These three served as Jesuit (Patrick), administrator (Sherwood) and as
bishop of Portland, Maine (James). James achieved the highest rank and
notoriety, but his service in Maine effectively isolated him from other black
people. He exchanged only a few letters with Archbishop Williams, and none
on racial matters within the church. Upon his death, the Pilot did not men¬
tion his race, or any contribution he made on race relations . 46

Black people, mostly from the Caribbean, had been part of the Catholic
community at least since 1789, praying in separate pews. In Williams’s time,
they worshiped at the cathedral, Immaculate Conception, and St. Joseph’s,
located in the integrated communities of the West and South Ends. Among
the worshipers was the outstanding civil rights attorney Robert Morris,
whose clientele included many Irish-Americans. According to his biographer,
Williams “arranged for a special mass at the Cathedral and gave one of his
own priests full charge of this portion of his flock.” This was probably the
Reverend Thomas J. McCormack, chancellor of the archdiocese, who, ac¬
cording to the Pilot, “has long had charge of the little Negro congregation.”
In the summer of 1906, Boston’s black Catholics requested a separate congre¬
gation, and apparently began to pray in segregation. There is no evidence
that any of the brothers Healy, or Boston’s black Catholics, tried to influence
church policy on civil rights matters between 1890 and 1920. 47

Williams died in 1908, and his coadjutor, the Lowell-born William Heniy

180 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

O’Connell (1859-1944) succeeded him. Associated with a conservative papacy,
his leadership marked the eclipse of the liberal “Americanist” wing of the
church; his biographer James OToole shows that he was imposed upon a
hostile New England priesthood. O’Connell launched a highly visible coun¬
terattack against perceived secular and Protestant indignities, contributing to
the polarized atmosphere of the city. He fought vigorously against modern¬
ism in the broad sense: secularism, women’s rights, sexual expression, and for
the notion of a “triumphant” Catholicism, whose implication was that the
church taught the one and only true way. His elevation to cardinal in 1911
showed that he had the backing of Rome. He centralized church power in his
own hands, and personalized the struggle against his opponents in a manner
analogous to James Michael Curley’s course in politics. In a broad sense,
O’Connell revived the old, antireform thrust of antebellum Irish Catholi¬
cism. 48

Like Williams, O’Connell paid little attention to American race relations
or to Boston’s few black Catholics. His policies had a chilling effect on reform
of any sort, and his tight control of church institutions shut down the Pilot
as a liberal organ. On the other hand, he promoted the Sisters of the Blessed
Sacrament, a national group of missionaries to racial minorities, whose Bos¬
ton endeavors he underwrote. The intentions of this latter project must be
viewed with a certain ambivalence, however.

O’Connell effectively stilled the echo of O’Reilly’s voice at the Pilot. Roche
resigned as editor in 1904, and Patrick M. Donahoe, a descendant of the
founder, gained financial control with the acquiesence of Williams, who re¬
garded himself as a trustee. Katherine Conway, an associate of O’Reilly, be¬
came the new editor, and continued in Roche’s genteel tradition of liberal
reform. For example, an April 1906 article, “A Model Parish of Colored
People in Washington, D.C.,” praised the piety of St. Cyprian’s parishioners.
Later that year, the Atlanta race riot brought a stern rebuke against white
malefactors. In 1908, O’Connell gained financial control and the Pilot became
the official organ of the archdiocese. David J. Toomey, a priest, assumed the
editorship, and the paper fell silent on race matters. 49

The tenor of the Pilot during the controversy over the showing of The
Birth of a Nation in April 1915, is instructive. During the most visible African-
American protest in Boston’s history to that date, the Pilot simply ignored the
matter. In March, the paper advocated stopping one stage play, and decried
playwrights George Bernard Shaw and Charles Rahn Kennedy as blasphe¬
mous. Culture in general was on the Pilot's agenda, but only as it affected
Catholics directly. Most telling of all was an editorial memorializing U.S.
Supreme Court Justice Roger Brooke Taney, whose “sterling Catholicity puts

The Legacy of John Boyle O’Reilly 181

him at the very forefront of the Catholic American laity.” While proudly
celebrating Taney’s long career, including his regard for the souls of his slaves,
whose freedom he “set about to establish,” the editorial could only say about
the Dred Scott decision that it was his most famous. Protests against the
racist film then showing in Boston went unnoticed . 50

O’Connell actively promoted the work of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacra¬
ment, the Mission to Indians and Negroes, founded by Philadelphia heiress
Katharine Drexel. He facilitated the group’s establishment in Boston and
contributed financially to the order, something he did not do for other orders.
At the same time, he limited the group’s right to raise funds on its own. The
Sisters came to Boston in 1914, locating their convent in the South End where
they proselytized and comforted the poor. With the aid of Reverend Father
[Michael?] Doody of Cambridge, they opened a “colored” Sunday school in
that city as well. 51

As with missionary work by any denomination, the business was heavily
invested with paternalist rhetoric and attitude. “Yet, in Boston, these dark
skinned children are not forgotten and missionaries are busily engaged in
bringing the consolations of religion to the colored people who live here¬
abouts,” the Pilot effused in 1916. By that time, this sensibility was at odds
with the emerging militancy and race-proud consciousness of Boston’s Afri¬
can-Americans and the paternalistic approach was bound to cause some re¬
sentment. O’Connell may have been especially interested in the Sisters as
part of his struggle against Protestant denominations, for as the Pilot noted,
“zealots of another fold” were hard at work in the same neighborhood. 52

THE LABOR MOVEMENT: INDIFFERENCE IN BLACK AND WHITE

Boston’s Irish-Americans gradually assumed the leadership of the city’s Cen¬
tral Labor Union between 1890 and 1920, as they did with the Democratic
Party and Catholic Church. The union movement grew more bureaucratic
and conservative, as did the American Federation of Labor under the leader¬
ship of Samuel Gompers. The bureaucratization of Boston’s unions cannot
be attributed to Irish leadership. If they failed to organize Boston’s African-
American workers, who toiled for the most part at menial jobs, so did other
white trade unionists.

Boston’s labor movement was more ethnically diverse than either the
Democratic Party or the Catholic Church. Yankees such as George E.
McNeill and Frank Foster were guiding lights for part of this time, and Yan¬
kees and British-Americans constituted an important part of the workforce.
Dominic D’Alessandro, leader of the Hodcarrier’s Union, represented an

182 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

Italian immigrant group that competed with Irish workers for jobs. Henry
Abrahams led the Cigarmakers Union, and thousands of Jews belonged to
the Hebrew Trades Association. African-American workers fared no better
where these leaders had influence than they did in the construction trades,
transportation, municipal unions, or teamsters, where Irish leadership was
strongest. The ethnic diversity of the labor movement also meant that the
competition between white ethnics for jobs, predominance of ideas, or organ¬
izing jurisdiction, pushed the possibility of black equality further down on
any white leaders agenda . 53

John Boyle O’Reilly did write about labor questions, but he exerted no
leadership in this field. His equivalent in Bostons labor history was of
Scotch-Irish descent, George E. McNeill (1837-1906) who, along with Ira
Steward, championed the eight-hour movement throughout the state.
McNeill helped lead the Knights of Labor, a more militant forerunner of the
American Federation of Labor. After McNeill lost an idealistic campaign for
mayor in 1886, his protege Frank Foster became editor of the Labor Leader ,
the official journal of several unions. Foster steered the labor movement into
the camp of the AFL, an entirely different course than the universal reformer
McNeill had imagined. Along the way, Foster had to beat down the attempts
of Marxists and other radicals to gain control of the AFL; this job was mostly
done by 1894. The Irish-American labor leaders rose in the context of waning
radicalism and waxing conservatism and prosperity. 54

Boston’s labor history followed the national trend. The implications of this
were largely negative for African-Americans. The Knights of Labor helped
to organize black workers, sometimes separately and sometimes in integrated
locals. The AFL’s record was much worse in this regard. Structurally, it was
a federation of organizations, not a membership organization. As such, it
officially discouraged whites-only unions, but in practice it tolerated them
and did little to organize black workers. In the construction trades, metal¬
working unions, railroad brotherhoods and other organizations, blacks were
effectively barred from membership . 55

There is a paucity of material on Boston’s Irish-American labor leaders of
this period, who include relatively obscure figures such as Cornelius Shea of
the Teamsters, Frank H. McCarthy of the Cigarmakers, John F. O’Sullivan
of the Typographical Union, and many others. Probably the best known is
Daniel Tobin, who rose from a poor Cambridge background to national lead¬
ership of the Teamsters in 1907. He retained an iron grip on the union until
1952, fighting against every progressive trend in labor history throughout his
career. He was never above vilifying his opponents because of their ethnic
background; he sided with anti-Semites like radio priest Father Charles

The Legacy of John Boyle O’Reilly 183

Coughlin during the 1930s. If he was more extreme than other Boston labor
leaders, he was not entirely atypical. 56

One of the best records of Boston’s labor movement in this period was
Foster’s Labor Leader. The columns were filled with engaging articles on con¬
temporary problems such as the eight-hour workday and the relation of the
labor movement to cooperativism and socialism. In contrast to the high level
of this discussion, Foster drew a complete blank on race relations. Over a
ten-year period, he almost never wrote about black workers. In December
1891, Foster traveled to an AFL convention in Alabama. From his railway car
he gaped at the segregated waiting rooms and listened to stories of disfran¬
chisement as if learning about these practices for the first time. This was the
southern way of doing things, he observed, and if he disapproved, he did not
say so. Earlier in the year he mused about Frederick Douglass’s reception in
Haiti: “How can other races have faith in the Negro when he has none in
himself?” Lynching, he noted briefly the following year, would cease only
when black crime did. Foster’s eyes were simply closed to the real problems. 57

John Daniels’s In Freedom's Birthplace is both an impressionistic account of
African-American Boston in this period and a statistically driven sociological
study. Daniels clearly demonstrates the marginality of black labor to the
union movement. Relying upon the census return of 1900, he found that in
Boston 13 percent of white males, 30 percent of white females, 61 percent of
black males, and 76 percent of Negro females worked at “menial” jobs. Of
the 2,930 black men in this category, 1,676 were servants or waiters, 404 were
porters, and 665 were day laborers. Of the 1,739 black women in this group,
1,222 were servants and 492 were laundry workers. In the next highest black
male industrial group were 150 teamsters, 75 construction workers, 30 masons,
19 printers and a scattered remainder. Of 367 black women in this group, 114
were dressmakers; the rest divided among various other occupations. Writing
in 1914, Daniels observed that the workers in the menial group were socially
segregated, while more in the skilled group worked in racially integrated set¬
tings. “Probably not much more than one union in twenty has any Negro
members at all, and of those which have, probably not over one in ten counts
half a dozen or more of this race on its rolls.” While Daniels thought the race
prejudice of union leaders was exaggerated, “it nevertheless remains true that
a considerable number of the unions are averse to admitting members of the
Negro race. The Negroes themselves complain that such is the case.” Daniels
concluded that “few, if any [unions] have shown any interest in the Negro’s
industrial welfare.” He knew of only one black union, the Boston Colored
Waiter’s Alliance, AFL Local 183, and this was more of a social club and
hiring hall than a labor organization. There were also a few black longshore-

184 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

men and teamster members. The latter worked mostly as coal-wagon drivers,
and one of these locals had a black majority. 58

Two visual images of Boston’s labor history dramatize this reality. On 20
February 1894, radical labor leaders led a protest of unemployed workers at
the statehouse. Among the throng of mostly immigrant workers reporters
noticed only a handful of colored faces. Fifteen years later, AFL members
demonstrated against the imprisonment of President Samuel Gompers, and
in a crowd of about a thousand, not one black face can be seen. 59 Irish-
American workers and their leaders, like other whites, insisted on excluding
African-Americans from their workplaces, unions, and struggles in Boston
just as they did in the rest of the country.

John Boyle O’Reilly dreamed a vision of the brotherhood of all the down¬
trodden; he saw the fate of the African-Americans and the Irish as one. By
1920, that dream had vanished. As the Boston Irish built a powerful political
party, church, and union apparatus, they forgot John Boyle O’Reilly and the
notion that no group is free while another is oppressed.

Moorfield Storey. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

SEVEN

Life Experience and the Law

The Cases of Holmes , Lewis , and Storey

“The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt
necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions
of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges
share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllo¬
gism in determining the rules by which men should be governed /’ 1 Thus
wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes in The Common Law. This chapter seeks to
discover the “experience” and “felt necessities of the time” that informed the
work of Moorfield Storey, William Henry Lewis, and Holmes himself as
they acted in the field of American race relations. All three lawyers had to
confront Boston’s antislavery heritage, and test its relevance against the evolv¬
ing new racial codes of the South.

As with Henry Cabot Lodge and George Frisbie Hoar in the political
arena, these Boston jurists exercised great influence in the courts of law and
public opinion between 1890 and 1920. Holmes, who paid little attention to
race relations, nevertheless wrote about a dozen important Supreme Court
opinions on voting rights, segregation, peonage, and due process of law dur¬
ing his tenure on the Court. His reluctance to overturn state judges or legisla¬
tures influenced his inclination to accept the new laws of the South. Lewis
began as a militant, but abandoned his principles to become an assistant
attorney general of the United States, the highest appointed position ever
held by an African-American at the time. Moorfield Storey was probably the
country’s leading civil rights lawyer during the second decade of the century.
He consciously carried forward the civil rights legacy of Charles Sumner,
whose secretary he had been as a young man.

All three lived during a period in which the mores and laws of society,
North and South, turned increasingly racist. In the legal field, few develop-

188 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

ments symbolized this more than the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v.
Ferguson (1896) and the reaction to it. This 7-1 decision affirmed that the
state of Louisiana could mandate segregation in public transportation. The
case became an important precedent and facilitated the segregation of the
South. The North did not seem to care. The northern press paid the decision
almost no attention, and even in Boston the verdict went unnoticed in the
newspapers. 2

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES AND THE INVISIBLE MEN

Oliver Wendell Holmes, who lived one of the richest intellectual lives in
American history, and was one of the country’s most influential jurists, wrote
nothing at all about African-Americans. He did not see them, either as in¬
dividuals or as a group with special concerns. In this, he reflected the nar¬
rowness of the Brahmin world, of which he was an outstanding and
thoroughbred example. This aspect of Holmes’s worldview is the more re¬
markable because of the enormity of his intellectual and even social reach. At
a time when Jews faced significant hostility, particularly in Boston’s legal
community, Holmes was conspicuously friendly with such Jewish thinkers as
Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, Harold Laski, Lewis Einstein, and Morris
Raphael Cohen. He even sought out Boston labor leader Frank Foster during
the labor turmoil of the 1890s. Yet he corresponded with no African-Ameri¬
can intellectuals or activists, and almost never referred to the race problem in
his correspondence. 3

Consequently, he contributed little of positive value to American law re¬
garding race relations. By the time of Holmes’s elevation to the Supreme
Court in 1902, African-American problems had disappeared from the white
American agenda. The Boston Brahmins, who now championed the cause of
Booker T. Washington, found in the Tuskegee educator the willing recipient
of their noblesse oblige. Holmes was not even prepared to accept Washing¬
ton’s vision of race relations. In two opinions on cases brought to the court
by Washington (who was working in secret), Holmes voted to reject the pleas
of black plaintiffs. 4

Holmes’s Civil War service was the defining experience of his life. He
fought for four years and was wounded three times, rejoining his regiment
after each convalescence. His Civil War letters suggest that he fought primar¬
ily from a sense of duty to his country and loyalty to his regiment. As an
intellectual, Holmes never seems to have confronted the central question of
the war: slavery and the place of the freedpeople in a reconstructed union.

Holmes wrote to family and friends of the dull horror of war. He wrote

The Cases of Holmes, Lewis, and Storey 189

without idealism or sentimentality, and with only occasional reference to the
grander issues of the conflict. The North was “vainly working to effect what
never happens—the subjugation (for that is it) of a great civilized nation. We
shan't do it—at least the Army can’t.” He wrote nothing of the Emancipation
Proclamation, and made only one cryptic reference to the black troops. One
biographer suggests that emancipation meant little to Holmes. When his
friend Norwood P. Hallowell accepted an invitation to lead African-Ameri¬
can soldiers, and urged Holmes to join him, Holmes declined. From his
letters, one surmises that Holmes saw no African-Americans at all during the
war, only once glimpsing what he called a “nigger hut.” 5

Holmes spent the Reconstruction years studying at Harvard Law School
and practicing corporation and admiralty law with a conservative Brahmin
firm. His social circle included William and Henry James, Moorfield Storey,
John Ropes and John Grey, Henry Adams, and Henry Cabot Lodge. As
editor of the American Law Review he evinced skepticism about the move¬
ment to codify the law. This early inclination toward legal scholarship led
him to edit the twelfth edition of Chancellor James Kent’s Commentaries at
the youthful age of 32; within a few years he was at work on his masterpiece,
The Common Law , published in 1881. 6

At the heart of The Common Law is the conception that the law is a dy¬
namic attempt to regulate human behavior by a society in flux, rather than a
static body of natural laws discovered by legal scientists. The text is informed
by a rich historical discussion of the origins of law. He finds that “laws de¬
vised for specific purposes often survived for centuries after their original
purpose had been served.” 7

This was a revolutionary notion in a profession whose mental world de¬
rived from a medieval cosmology of fixed laws and principles. At the same
time, there is a fatalism in Holmes’s conception, embodied in the passage
quoted at the beginning of this chapter. His attitude toward “the prejudices
which judges share with their fellow-men” was that these should be re¬
spected. The “first requirement of a sound body of law is, that it should
correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community,” wrote
Holmes. 8 This necessitated judicial conservatism, and, on the surface, a lib¬
eral respect for the democratic practice of the community. The problem with
this approach lay in how to accommodate the rights of those excluded from
the body politic, such as the blacks in the South.

This judicial conservatism lay at the heart of Holmes’s philosophy. He was
reluctant to strike down legislation from the bench. In Massachusetts this
earned Holmes a “Progressive” reputation: during Holmes’s tenure on the
state’s high court (December 1882 to December 1901), Massachusetts legisla-

190 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

tures passed a series of Progressive regulatory measures that Holmes let stand
when challenged. This did not imply Holmes’s sympathy with any particular
law, or with the cause of labor. When Holmes was in doubt, he preferred to
find a law “not unconstitutional” rather than “constitutional,” a less emphatic
formulation that nevertheless allowed the legislature considerable leeway.
Holmes’s loose construction of the state constitution employed a less strin¬
gent test than many of his brethren used . 9

This tolerance of progressive legislation, Holmes’s Civil War record, and
his impressive scholarship recommended him to the new president, Theodore
Roosevelt. Henry Cabot Lodge, Roosevelt’s friend, advanced the nomina¬
tion, for Holmes had befriended Lodge during 1884 when the future senator
stood fast for Republican presidential nominee James G. Blaine. Some Mas¬
sachusetts businessmen opposed Holmes for his occasional pro-labor rulings,
and Senator George Frisbie Hoar preferred his own favorite, but Holmes was
easily confirmed in the Senate. 10

In two early decisions on grand jury composition, Holmes wrote cautious
opinions, the first of which set legal formalities above social realities. This
was a unanimous opinion that reflected the spirit of the times. In Brownfield
v. South Carolina (1903), the plaintiff, convicted of murder, argued that “the
grand jury was composed wholly of white persons, and that all negroes, al¬
though constituting four-fifths of the population and of the registered voters
of the county, were excluded on account of their race and color.” Holmes
found that John Brownfield had failed to prove that blacks were intentionally
kept off the jury. Brownfield had merely moved to quash the indictment
based on the alleged discrimination, but brought no evidence. “The case
involves questions of the gravest character,” Holmes concluded, “but we must
deal with it according to the record, and the record discloses no wrong.” 11

While Holmes’s opinion was restricted to the procedural question, the
state supreme court decision shows that Brownfield had killed an arresting
officer, alleging self-defense. Brownfield argued that a plainclothes officer
unknown to him had assaulted him with a pistol, and that he, Brownfield,
was in terror of his life . 12 It is difficult to imagine that a jury four-fifths black
would have heard this case in the same way as an all-white jury, or that
an all-white jury could have been assembled without recourse to deliberate
discrimination. Brownfield’s attorneys bungled the case, relying on prima
facie evidence to prove intentional discrimination in jury selection. However,
even with adequate representation, intent to discriminate would have been
hard to prove.

Presented with a stronger case the following year, Holmes found in Rogers
v. Alabama that deliberate exclusion of black people from grand juries did

The Cases of Holmes, Lewis, and Storey 191

violate the Fourteenth Amendment. Dan Rogers was convicted of murder in
Montgomery County, Alabama, and the case came to the attention of Booker
T. Washington. Acting in strict secrecy, Washington raised money for the
case and saw that Rogers was represented by the able Wilford H. Smith. 13

This time, Holmes found that the case was properly argued by the defen¬
dant but wrongly judged. The newly revised Alabama constitution did intend
to exclude blacks from the voting and grand jury lists. The Alabama court
threw out this motion on the grounds of prolixity: the defense attorneys had
argued an irrelevant point at too great a length. Relying upon the opinion of
Justice Grey in Carter v. Texas , Holmes reversed the decision of the lower
court, upholding an already established precedent. 14

Holmes failed to grasp the reality of American race relations in Giles v.
Harris , which he wrote for a six-judge majority. Alabama amended its consti¬
tution in 1901 for the purpose of disfranchising black voters. Under the new
law, prospective voters might be asked to write an article of the Constitution,
show proof of employment during the past twelve months, or demonstrate
ownership of forty acres. Prospective voters might also have to answer, under
oath, questions about where they had lived and worked for the last five years.
However, war veterans, or merely “persons of good character,” might also
vote. “As we have said,” Holmes wrote, “according to the allegations of the
bill this part of the constitution, as practically administered and as intended
to be administered, let in all whites and kept out a large part, if not all, of the
blacks.” 15

Although Booker T. Washington and the faculty at Tuskegee Institute
were allowed to register, all over the state black men were turned away. Gov¬
ernor William D. Jelks wrote frankly to an Alabama senator that “the spirit
of the constitution . . . looks to the registration of all white men not convicted
of crime, and only a few negroes.” A Colored Men’s Suffrage Association of
Alabama was formed and Washington secretly underwrote the legal expenses
of the suit brought by the association. Jackson W. Giles, a leader of the
group, lost his challenge in the state court, and the Federal Circuit judge, a
Theodore Roosevelt appointee recommended by Washington, decided that
he had no jurisdiction . 16

Holmes agreed that the circuit judge could not hear the case, “because the
bill did not aver threatened damage to an amount exceeding two thousand
dollars.” Holmes decided instead that the Supreme Court had jurisdiction,
and could properly rule on the case. Two problems brought Holmes to decide
against the plaintiffs. First, Holmes asked rhetorically, if the Alabama consti¬
tution was unlawful, “how can we make the Court a party to the unlawful
scheme by accepting it and adding another voter to its fraudulent list?” The

192 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

second problem was that the Court had no authority to dictate political poli¬
cies. “Apart from damages to the individual, relief from a great political
wrong, if done as alleged, by the people of a state and the state itself, must
be given by them or by the legislative and political department of the govern¬
ment of the United States .” 17

Holmes's opinion placed technicalities over substance and employed circu¬
lar reasoning. His finding that the circuit court did not have jurisdiction
validated the evasion of responsibility by the lower court. On the substantive
matter, Holmes's logic was circular: if the constitution was invalid, the plain¬
tiffs could not get relief by appealing to it. The implication was that there
was no way to register blacks through an appeal to the court, as the remainder
of the opinion made explicit. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments
disappear from this cold reasoning. The political reality, that henceforth
black voters would be barred by white registrars, was lost on Holmes. He
also ignored the consequences of disfranchisement—further segregation and
economic oppression—upon African-Americans.

Three justices dissented from the ruling in Giles , an odd combination of
the liberal John Marshall Harlan and the normally conservative David Brewer
and Henry Brown, author of Plessy. Harlan restricted his argumentation espe¬
cially to the question of the circuit court’s jurisdiction, but disagreed emphati¬
cally with Holmes on the substantive issue, concluding that “the plaintiff is
entitled to relief in respect of his right to be registered as a voter.” Brewer
agreed that the circuit court had jurisdiction, and that the plaintiff was
wrongfully denied his rights. Brown did not write. The opinion of these
dissenters throws into more sharp relief Holmes's blindness on racial mat¬
ters . 18

The decision was deeply demoralizing to the plaintiffs. Washington’s law¬
yer refused to press the case further through the slim window of opportunity
left open, that damages might be collected. He withdrew, telling Washing¬
ton’s aide that the ruling had given him a bad case of the blues. Jackson Giles,
however, persisted, only to be rebuffed in the Supreme Court the following
year . 19

Further insight into Holmes’s views on race can be gained from his rulings
on cases involving lynching. Lynching was anarchy, and it flew directly in the
face of the rule of law. Holmes moved energetically to suppress it in three
dramatic cases that appeared before the Court: Shipp (1906 and 1909), Frank
v. Mangum (1915), and Moore v. Dempsey (1923). In February 1906, Ed John¬
son, a Tennessee black man, was convicted of raping and murdering a white
woman and sentenced to hang. Johnson asked for a writ of habeas corpus at
the U.S. Circuit Court, arguing that the exclusion of Negroes from the jury

The Cases of Holmes, Lewis, and Storey 193

and the threat of violence at the trial deprived him of his right to due process
of law. The petition was denied, Johnson appealed to the Supreme Court,
Harlan issued a stay, and the sheriff was notified. That night Chattanooga
Sheriff John F. Shipp withdrew the guard from Johnson’s cell and the pris¬
oner was lynched by a mob.

The Supreme Court ordered an investigation into Shipp’s conduct, and
the Justice Department subsequently charged Shipp with contempt of court.
Holmes wrote a strong opinion for a unanimous Court that, contrary to the
defendant’s claim, the Court did have jurisdiction in the case and was not a
party to the suit. Three years later, when the substantive matter came before
the Court, Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller wrote the opinion himself, and
finding Shipp in contempt, ordered a ninety-day prison term. Holmes
thought a one-year sentence more appropriate. 20

The Leo Frank case, in which Holmes and Justice Charles Evans Hughes
dissented from a majority opinion, contributed to the image of Holmes as a
“great dissenter.” The important issue to Holmes was, as in Shipps subversion
of the rule of law by mob violence. Although no black people were involved
in this case, Frank, a Jew, served as a surrogate Negro and outsider to the
mob. As in Shipp , the core of the case was a charge of rape and murder. The
decision of the Court would clearly affect the ability of mobs to intimidate
judges and juries, especially in criminal cases against black people.

During Frank’s trial in 1913, angry mobs threatened to kill the judge if the
verdict was not guilty. Inside the courtroom the crowd hooted and cheered
during the trial. Frank was convicted and condemned to die. After one appeal
failed, Frank turned to Justice Joseph Rucker Lamar of Georgia, who turned
him down on the ground that the issue was a state matter. Frank next ap¬
pealed to Holmes, who reluctantly agreed with Lamar, but expressed his
doubts to his fellow justices. Frank again approached Lamar, who, perhaps
influenced by Holmes, changed his mind and the case went to the Court,
which ruled 7-2 against Frank.

Holmes wrote a bitter dissent, in collaboration with Hughes. He described
“a court packed with spectators and surrounded by a crowd outside, all
strongly hostile to the petitioner.” The judge urged Frank and his attorney to
stay outside the court when the verdict was read, lest the mob attack in the
event of acquittal. Leaving aside Frank’s right to be present when the verdict
was read, Holmes found that “mob law does not become due process of law
by securing the assent of a terrorized jury.” The atmosphere of the trial en¬
tered Holmes’s opinion. “Any judge who has sat with juries knows that in
spite of forms they are extremely likely to be impregnated with the environing
atmosphere.” After Frank’s defeat in the Court, the governor commuted his

194 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

sentence to life in prison, and Frank was lynched. If ever subsequent develop¬
ments suggested the validity of an opinion, the grisly conclusion of the Frank
case vindicated Holmes and Hughes . 21

Eight years later the Court effectively reversed itself and accepted their
argument in the Frank case. After a meeting of Arkansas tenant farmers was
attacked by white men in 1919, a violent confrontation ensued and a large
number of blacks were arrested. By 1923, a remnant of these were condemned
to death in a brief trial before which witnesses had been beaten and mob rule
prevailed. Holmes, this time writing for a 7-2 majority in Moore v. Dempsey ,
ruled that the Arkansas court violated the due process of law, and the convic¬
tions were overturned . 22

Holmes was much more reluctant to interfere with state courts on eco¬
nomic matters. In the case of Alonzo Bailey, an Alabama black man con¬
victed of a criminal charge for running out on a fifteen-dollar debt, Holmes
dissented from a majority opinion finding the Alabama law unconstitutional.
This was another case engineered secretly by Booker Washington. Attorney
General Charles J. Bonaparte filed a friend of the court brief. Dismissed at
first on a technicality in 1908, the case returned to the Court in 1911. The
Court found the Alabama debt law to sanction peonage (that is, involuntary
servitude) and thus to violate the Thirteenth Amendment . 23

Holmes wrote the majority opinion in 1908, sending it back to the lower
court for lack of evidence. He ruled that Bailey was seeking a “short cut” by
coming to the Court without exhausting other remedies. Harlan disagreed.
The “short cut” Bailey sought was merely to be released on a writ of habeas
corpus from jail in Alabama, pending the final decision, Harlan wrote. The
Supreme Court had the responsibility to determine the constitutional ques¬
tion, and ought to do so at once. Delay was cruel and “unprecedented,” Har¬
lan angrily concluded. 24

The case went back to the Alabama courts, and Bailey was found guilty.
When Bailey appeared again before the Supreme Court, Hughes struck down
the Alabama law as a violation of the Thirteenth Amendment, not consider¬
ing Fourteenth Amendment arguments brought forth by plaintiffs. Hughes
also rejected the notion that the case involved race discrimination, but he
ruled the law “an instrument of compulsion peculiarly effective as against the
poor and the ignorant, its most likely victims.” He saw the statute as an
unconstitutional antilabor law, giving employers the chance to criminalize
refractory employees who had merely fallen into debt . 25

Holmes dissented, with only Justice Horace H. Lurton, a Tennessee Dem¬
ocrat, joining him. He seized on Hughes's admission that the race question
was not involved, taking that as his starting point. Bailey had simply broken

The Cases of Holmes, Lewis, and Storey 195

his contract, and “the Thirteenth Amendment does not outlaw contracts for
labor.” Nor was Bailey a peon. “Peonage is service to a private master at
which a man is kept by bodily compulsion against his will.” Punishing a man
for breaking a contract by means of a fine, imprisonment, or labor “does not
make the laborer a slave.” Furthermore, if the law were an effective deterrent
to contract-breaking, all the better. “I think that obtaining money by fraud
may be made a crime as well as murder or theft,” Holmes concluded. 26

Once again, the wider social reality disappeared in the face of Holmes's
cold legal logic. Thanks to Booker Washington’s careful secret work, the case
was publicized in the Progressive press. The Independent , World's Work , and
other journals hailed the outcome. Washington wrote to President William
Howard Taft’s secretary, calling the ruling “the most important decision in
justice to the colored people ... in many years, and the fact that almost the
first decision rendered after a Southern Democrat [Edward Douglas White]
was made Chief Justice [is] in favor of the Negro is most encouraging.” Taft
concurred. Holmes, a darling of such Progressives as Louis Brandeis, ruled
to uphold a status quo that even Taft would overturn. 27

In a later, related case, Holmes reluctantly sided with a majority (there
were no dissenters, but one justice recused himself) by writing a terse concur¬
ring opinion. U.S. v. Reynolds and U.S. v. Broughton, decided together, were
Justice Department challenges to the criminal-surety system of Alabama and
Georgia. Under this scheme, a convicted offender could have his fine paid by
a third party and work off the debt to the payor. White farmers thus secured
cheap black labor and developed a vested interest in maintaining a steady
supply of debt peons. Reynolds and Broughton were white Alabama farmers
sympathetic to civil rights who agreed to arrange a test case. Justice William
R. Day wrote a lengthy opinion finding the surety system in violation of
the Thirteenth Amendment. Holmes’s one-paragraph concurrence omits the
Thirteenth Amendment grounds for overturning the laws, thus suggesting
that a state might craft some more limited instrument to similar effect. 28

Holmes had little sympathy for legal challenges to social segregation. He
accepted the notion that state legislatures could mandate segregation without
federal interference, even if the separate facilities were unequal, in McCabe v.
Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. In Buchanan v. Warley , he was almost a lone
dissenter against a decision striking down a Louisville, Kentucky, residential
segregation ordinance. Both cases he regarded skeptically as contrived efforts
to overturn laws that reflected the general sense of the community.

A 1907 Separate Coach Law in Oklahoma contained a section allowing
railroads to provide no sleeping-car or first-class service for black people. In
McCabe , five black Oklahomans challenged the law. Hughes, writing for a

196 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

majority, agreed that the law did not live up to the “separate but equal”
concept of the Plessy formula. Nevertheless the Court ruled on behalf of the
railroads because the plaintiffs themselves had not been turned away. The
majority essentially asked the plaintiffs to try again, after arranging a direct
confrontation with the railroads. Holmes concurred with the outcome, but
separated himself from the reasoning, suggesting that for him the case was
permanently closed . 29

Holmes played a similar foot-dragging role in Buchanan v. Warley , a chal¬
lenge to the Louisville, Kentucky, residential segregation ordinance. The case
was arranged by the local National Association for the Advancement of Col¬
ored People so that a sympathetic white realtor sued the leader of the
NAACP for breach of contract to purchase real property, citing the segrega¬
tion ordinance. The realtor, Buchanan, represented by Moorfield Storey of
the NAACP, sought to complete the sale by striking at the ordinance. This
the Court did, overturning the law on Fourteenth Amendment grounds.
Holmes ultimately joined a unanimous Court, but not before drafting a dis¬
sent that he withdrew at the last minute. Complaining that the case was
“manufactured,” Holmes further decided that it was manufactured poorly. A
white plaintiff could not “avail himself of this collateral mode of attack, on
the ground of a wrong to someone else.” Finding himself in a minority of
one, Holmes dropped the dissent for obscure reasons . 30

Holmes wrote two more opinions on voting rights that showed an advance
over his earlier ruling in Giles . Additionally, he joined a majority decision
written by Chief Justice White that overturned Oklahoma's “grandfather”
clause. U.S. v. Mosley (1915) ordered that all votes in an Oklahoma election
must be counted; and Nixon v. Herndon (1927) threw out a Texas white pri¬
mary law.

Mosley overturned a district court decision that a 1909 federal law did not
apply to a conspiracy to ignore votes. There was little doubt that two Blaine
County, Oklahoma, election officials had met without the knowledge of the
third member to plan the fraudulent counting of votes in eleven precincts
during a congressional election. The federal law was drawn from an 1870
anti-Ku Klux Klan statute, and the defendants held that it was not applicable
to their actions. Holmes found that the appropriate section “had a general
scope and used general words that have become the most important now that
the Ku Klux Klan have passed away.” Here was Holmes's dynamic conception
of the law utilized to put a broad construction upon congressional intent; the
spirit of the interpretation is at loggerheads with its author’s legalistic finding
in Giles twelve years earlier . 31

Holmes authored Nixon v. Herndon for a unanimous Court in 1927. This

The Cases of Holmes, Lewis, and Storey 197

decision, easily arrived at, invalidated a 1923 Texas law that barred Negroes
from participating in the Democratic primary. There was no indirection in
the law’s language. Since Texas was effectively a one-party state, this deprived
African-Americans of a meaningful vote. The Court overturned the law on
the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment. 32

Holmes’s rulings affecting the fate of African-Americans are uneven. In no
sense did he resurrect Boston’s tradition of leading the nation in the
struggle for civil rights. During Holmes’s tenure on the Court, that distinc¬
tion belonged first to the Kentuckian Harlan and later to the New Yorker
Hughes. Holmes was generally willing to support the political rights of Afri¬
can-Americans, as his rulings in Rogers, Mosley, and Nixon v. Herndon show.
He steadfastly upheld the rule of law in opposition to mob violence in Shipp,
the Frank case, and Moore v. Dempsey. In Giles, where he refused to grant
relief in a clear disfranchisement case, and Brownfield, where he accepted the
indictment of an all-white grand jury in a majority black county, he showed
an unwillingness to look forward to civil equality. On desegregation and
peonage cases, Holmes’s judicial conservatism rendered him deaf to African-
American pleas for justice. Had he kept the antislavery tradition alive, to¬
gether with Harlan or Hughes he might have exerted a powerful influence,
and signaled civil rights forces that in the Court they had an ally. He did not,
and his record reflects the atrophy of the Brahmin conscience.

WILLIAM HENRY LEWIS AND THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN DILEMMA

During Reconstruction and its aftermath, a small group of notable African-
American attorneys practiced in Boston. These men were products of the
antislavery crusade and the Radical Republican period. As lawyers, they
played a special role within the emerging black upper class, in that they neces¬
sarily interacted more with white society than other professionals. Some black
lawyers had white patrons who advanced their careers; some were especially
influenced by African-American leaders; some enjoyed both advantages.
These Bostonians were among the first generation of black lawyers in
America.

Robert Morris, Boston’s first African-American lawyer, trained in the of¬
fice of Ellis Gray Loring and assisted Charles Sumner during the school
desegregation case ( Roberts v. Boston) of 1849. John Swett Rock had a remark¬
ably varied career, and was the first black attorney to argue in the Supreme
Court. Edwin G. Walker was the son of David Walker, the abolitionist pam¬
phleteer. Governor Benjamin Butler nominated him for the municipal court
judgeship in Charlestown, but he was not confirmed. In his place Butler

198 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

successfully appointed George L. Ruffin. Ruffin was a friend of Frederick
Douglass; he wrote a preface for one of Douglass’s autobiographies. Ruffin
and Walker served in the state legislature. Walker and Morris participated in
the freeing of Shadrach, the fugitive slave. Taken as a group, these were
distinguished men unalterably committed to the antislavery tradition, who
rose with their race . 33

These men inspired a second generation of African-American attorneys in
Boston. Some of them had direct links to their professional predecessors, and
many of them had patrons or clients among whites. Born around the time of
the Civil War, they came to maturity in the 1890s. This second generation,
however, faced more complex problems than the men who preceded them.
The earlier generation rose professionally with an ascending antiracist senti¬
ment fostered by the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction. The sec¬
ond generation faced a new rise of racism that generated an alliance between
white philanthropists and black accommodationists. Lawyers, more than
other black professionals, found that the new national arrangement affected
their career path, especially if they aspired to elective or appointive office.

In Boston, attorneys Emery T. Morris, Edgar P. Benjamin, Butler Wilson,
Archibald Grimke, and Clement Morgan generally followed the trail blazed
by the earlier generation. Emery T. Morris, a nephew of Robert Morris, held
a minor post in Cambridge. Edgar P. Benjamin was a community leader in
Boston’s South End; both he and Morris assisted the protest movement led
by Monroe Trotter. Morgan, Harvard’s Class Day orator in 1890, was a friend
of W. E. B. Du Bois and the leader of the Massachusetts Niagara movement.
Butler Wilson was a law partner of Ruffin’s son and became a central leader
of the local NAACP. Archibald Grimke practiced law only briefly before
being appointed consul to Santo Domingo in 1894. His career was by far the
most distinguished of this group, but not in the field of law. He won greater
fame as a writer and activist, and lived much of his life in Washington, D.C.
There he was a community leader and, like his friend Butler Wilson, presi¬
dent of the NAACP. This summary description of the careers of these civil
rights-oriented attorneys shows a distinct falling-off from the achievements
of the earlier group. None served in the state legislature; none served as a
judge; none argued in the Supreme Court. Compared to Robert Morris,
Rock, Walker, and Ruffin, their legal careers were more marginal. 34

However, other second-generation black Boston attorneys did enjoy more
elevated positions. These men looked to Booker T. Washington as their
leader and thus found more favor with powerful white men. Law partners
James H. Wolff and Edward Everett Brown were prominent supporters of
Washington. Wolff, a Civil War Navy veteran, was a leader of the Massachu-

The Cases of Holmes, Lewis, and Storey 199

setts Grand Army of the Republic, which included white and black veterans.
He delivered Boston’s Fourth of July oration in 1910. In the aftermath of
Monroe Trotter’s confrontation with Booker Washington in Boston, Edward
Everett Brown was quoted in several Boston newspapers defending the
Tuskegean. A few years later, Mayor John F. Fitzgerald appointed Brown an
assistant commissioner of public health, the highest appointive municipal
office held by a Boston African-American to that date. 35 These, however,
were minor achievements compared to the prominence gained by William
Henry Lewis, who was probably the most famous black attorney of his day.
Lewis began as a militant, but went over to the opposing camp when he
realized that Washington had the inside track with power. His career reveals
much about black politics and the law during the era of Booker T. Wash¬
ington.

Lewis “repeatedly and flagrantly sold his honor and sold out his race in
order to get a political position with a salary he has seemed unable to earn at
the law,” Monroe Trotter charged in 1907. Yet, by 1915 the two worked toward
the same goal in a campaign to ban The Birth of a Nation in Boston, and
worked together to elect David I. Walsh, Democrat, governor of the state.
Of all the race leaders in Boston in this period, Lewis is marked most clearly
by his ambition, and Trotter by his principles. The collapse of the possibility
for advancement of African-Americans in politics during the Woodrow Wil¬
son administration brought a reconciliation between the two antagonists,
who had started in the same camp.

Like Butler Wilson, Morgan, Ruffin, and other black attorneys, Lewis
migrated to Boston from the South. Born in Virginia in 1868, the child of
freedpeople, he arrived at Amherst College at the age of twenty, where col¬
lege president Julius H. Seelye encouraged him. Academic excellence and
outstanding football playing carried him to Harvard Law School, where he
became the first African-American named to the All-America team. Theo¬
dore Roosevelt’s interest in sports brought Lewis to his attention; as governor
of New York he entertained Lewis at the Executive Mansion. 36

Denied service at a Cambridge barbershop in 1893, Lewis, with the aid of
Butler Wilson, persuaded a state legislator to present a bill broadening the
scope of an 1885 civil rights act. The bill passed, banning discrimination in all
public places. When Booker T, Washington came to Boston in 1898 to mend
fences with the local elite at a Young’s Hotel dinner, Lewis spoke against
accommodationism. He won election to the Cambridge Common Council
the following year, and served three one-year terms. Lewis was the last Afri¬
can-American to serve in the state house of representatives for many years,

200 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

winning a seat in 1902 but failing in a reelection bid. His early career was that
of a civil rights activist in the mold of Morris, Rock, Walker, or Ruffin. 37

Oddly enough, it was W. E. B. Du Bois who reconciled Lewis and Wash¬
ington, and by 1901, the two were corresponding. “I should like very much to
have the place of First assistant District Attorney,” the Bostonian implored,
and by the next year, Lewis had the job. Washington was at first reluctant to
approve President Roosevelt’s decision to appoint him, but by assenting to it,
won Lewis as a key ally in his dispute with Monroe Trotter. 38

Lewis became a tough factional fighter for his new friend. He accompanied
Washington to the 1903 Louisville meeting of the Afro-American Council,
at which the radicals were steamrolled. At the July 1903 Boston Riot, Lewis
was in the chair to handle any disrupters. He testified against Trotter, and
advised Washington in a libel case the Tuskegean loosed upon the Guardian ,
Trotter’s newspaper. Lewis foiled a second Trotter scheme to heckle a Wash¬
ington meeting, and connived with Washington to seize financial control of
the Guardian when Trotter ally George W. Forbes sold his stock in the paper.
The former militant became a key player in the campaign of dirty tricks
against Trotter. 39

Lewis maintained his appointed position until 1906, when he was pro¬
moted to assistant United States District Attorney for the New England
States (1907-11), handling naturalization cases especially. The timing of this
promotion suggests that Lewis’s silence on the Brownsville case won him
further favor in the president’s eyes. “He [Roosevelt] appointed me assistant
United States Attorney in Massachusetts,” Lewis said of Roosevelt in 1912,
“and in return I defended the discharge of the Brownsville soldiers, a thing
which no other colored Federal office-holder did.” 40

When some African-Americans flirted with Democratic presidential can¬
didate William Jennings Bryan in 1908, or endorsed him, Lewis remained a
steadfast Taft man. The Republican victory set off a flurry of mail between
the ambitious Lewis and his patron. “I cannot afford to remain longer in the
Federal service unless there is some chance for promotion,” Lewis com¬
plained. “If I could get a chance in Washington in the Department of Justice,
I feel certain that I could ‘make good’ and put race prejudice to flight in that
department.” Booker Washington worked behind the scenes with Taft and
on 14 June 1911, Lewis sent Washington his thanks upon being confirmed
assistant attorney general. Lewis arranged a testimonial in Washington,
D.C., for his benefactor . 41

After Lewis’s confirmation, he was accepted as a member of the all-white
American Bar Association, along with Boston’s Butler Wilson and William
Morris, a Minnesota African-American. When racists challenged their ad-

The Cases of Holmes, Lewis, and Storey

201

mission, the ABA leadership demanded that the men resign, claiming it was
unaware of their race. At the 1912 Milwaukee convention of the ABA, Attor¬
ney General George W. Wickersham, Lewis’s boss, threatened to resign if
Lewis was expelled, and none of the black attorneys were kicked out. Wicker¬
sham, however, did not oppose the introduction of the color line into the
association, suggesting that in the future, applicants should state their race.
This policy was adopted with a view toward keeping the organization all-
white. 42

The NAACP later waged a campaign against racial exclusivity in the ABA,
but Lewis himself was silent throughout the controversy. He was in the un¬
comfortable position of being both an apologist for segregation and a victim
of it. The entire experience could only have been humiliating for him. Soon
afterward he was speedily ousted from office with the coming of the Wood-
row Wilson administration. This marked the end of Lewis’s political ambi¬
tion. At first he asked Booker Washington to secure an appointment for him
with John D. Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie, but later decided to honor his
wife’s request and returned to Boston and private practice. 43

While in public office, Lewis several times showed a reluctance to break
all ties to civil rights activists. He may have sensed that Booker Washington’s
star was going into eclipse, and that his own career might later depend on
the support of his current opponents. When Trotter and Du Bois quarreled
in 1907 within the Niagara movement, Lewis organized a banquet for Du
Bois. Later Trotter campaigned for Bryan in 1908, and Massachusetts blacks
voted overwhelmingly for Taft. Washington wrote to Lewis immediately, ur¬
ging him to take the leadership of Boston’s black community. Lewis was
more interested in the appointive office he ultimately secured. Four years
later, he consulted Washington about joining the NAACP, although there
is no evidence that he did join. Gradually, he rebuilt his ties to his earlier
positions. 44

William H. Ferris described Lewis as “a second Daniel Webster” as an
orator, “a man whose eloquence is irresistible.” He testified to Lewis’s mag¬
nificent voice, and claimed to have seen and heard him “sweep the member¬
ship of the Twentieth Century Club of Boston off their feet .” 45 The state
legislature chose him as Lincoln Day speaker on the fiftieth anniversary of
the Emancipation Proclamation. There he attacked antimiscegenation laws,
then being floated in Congress, as incapable of accomplishing their laudable
purpose. Only by granting justice to the Negro would he end his desire to
escape blackness by merging with the white. Sounding a Tuskegee theme, he
called for economic opportunity and state support for public education as the
touchstones of Negro progress. He extolled Massachusetts’s abolitionist past

202 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

and offered its antidiscriminatory legislation as a model for the nation. He
challenged the state to live up to its noble traditions. This skillful blending
of accommodationist and civil rights themes foreshadowed a new course for
the Lewis who was through with office-seeking. In 1915 he participated in the
campaign against The Birth of a Nation and spoke at a testimonial for the
Guardian .* 6

In one sense, William Henry Lewis can be seen as a careerist who simply
did whatever was necessary to get ahead. He provided a fig-leaf cover for the
Republican betrayal of the promise of Reconstruction. He defended Presi¬
dent Theodore Roosevelt after the Brownsville incident, and worse than that,
failed to speak out against the panoply of abuse in the South. He was a
product of the Tuskegee Machine, and the dilemma of accommodation was
that its advocates rose as the race declined. Lewis’s career followed exactly
that path. Despite the high position he reached, he was never able to strike a
blow for freedom within the corridors of power, or by representing a civil
rights litigant. On the national stage, it would not be until the 1930s that
African-American attorneys, operating out of the NAACP’s legal depart¬
ment, would begin the long march to freedom through the courts.

MOORFIELD STOREY: CHARLES SUMNER’S HEIR

More than any other white person in the history of Boston, Moorfield Storey
represents the rebirth of the abolitionist spirit. As a young man he served
briefly as Senator Charles Sumner’s secretary during Reconstruction; in
midcareer he was an economically conservative corporation counsel and presi¬
dent of the American Bar Association; and as an older man he became the
first president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People. The spur to Storey’s renewed commitment was his outrage over
America’s imperial policy in the Philippines. In this he followed Sumner’s
opposition to U.S. designs upon the Dominican Republic. Through this
process he rediscovered for himself and the nation the defining impulse of
Sumner’s life: to establish equality before the law for all Americans.

Storey served as president of the NAACP, a symbolic post, from 1909 until
his death in 1929. Sixty-four years old at the time of the association’s birth,
and resident in Boston while the movement’s headquarters was in New York,
he provided the new organization an aura of respectability as a corporation
lawyer, and of principle, as the former leader of American anti-imperialism.
While he did not participate in the squabbles of the NAACP’s New York
office, or in the activities of the Boston branch, he was no mere figurehead.
Storey was the leading legal strategist for an organization that relied in part

The Cases of Holmes, Lewis, and Storey 203

upon the courts to win justice. In addition, he thoroughly understood the
need to mobilize public opinion for civil rights and helped the NAACP to
do that in the most effective manner. The combination of his prominence in
Boston (which was probably greater than that of any other NAACP leader
in his respective city), his connection to Sumner, and his dignified character,
made him the perfect symbol of the association in its earliest days.

The course of Storey's career, especially when viewed in relation to that of
Henry Cabot Lodge, reveals a paradox regarding the course of the civil rights
impulse among the Brahmins. Lodge was influenced by Sumner too, albeit
not so directly as Storey. Like Sumner, Lodge and Storey opposed govern¬
ment corruption during the Ulysses S. Grant administration. Lodge stayed
with the Republican Party, however, through the unsuccessful presidential
campaign of James G. Blaine in 1884, and as a party loyalist authored the
election bill of 1890, which would have protected African-American voters
had it passed. Storey broke with the party in 1884, because of his opposition
to the perceived opportunism of Blaine. He opposed the Federal Elections
bill as a partisan scheme. Lodge and Storey subsequently moved in opposite
directions on civil rights matters, with the former becoming increasingly in¬
different and the latter increasingly outspoken. The abolitionist impulse thus
went underground within Storey, for about twenty-five years.

When the spirit reemerged within him, it came out full-blown. He was as
deeply rooted in the New England tradition as Holmes or Lodge. He was a
Harvard man and Brahmin corporation lawyer, but the values of the prein¬
dustrial New England town seemed forever his polestar. In various parts Puri¬
tan Reformer, Transcendentalist, and Conscience Whig, he had the vision of
John Winthrop, the optimism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the militancy
of Charles Sumner. His career exemplifies the endurance of the abolitionist
tradition into the twentieth century. 47

A Brahmin descendant of Puritan forebears, Storey’s own father failed
at the law. Charles Storey anticipated receiving an inheritance that never
materialized, and consequently abjured the virtue of industry for the pleasures
of conviviality. He numbered among his friends Judge Ebenezer Rockwood
Hoar, the antislavery poet James Russell Lowell, and John Holmes, brother
of the famous doctor. To the extent that he was politically inclined, Charles
Storey was a Conscience Whig, and his connections facilitated the appoint¬
ment of his son, then a student at the Harvard Law School, as an aide to
Senator Sumner. 48

This position was a powerful influence upon the career of an impression¬
able young man, even though he served only from November 1867 until the
spring of 1869. Storey was more than an employee, and for part of the time

204 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

he shared living quarters with the senator. In his capacity as amanuensis
Storey entertained the luminaries of Washington society. During this service
he saw the lonely Sumner through the impeachment of Andrew Johnson and
the early days of Reconstruction. His later efforts against imperialism and for
civil rights paralleled those of his mentor. 49

There is an air of the amused young bon vivant in Storey’s letters of this
period. He displayed none of Sumner’s moral intensity. Storey saw this qual¬
ity in Sumner as an admirable trait born of the direct confrontation with the
slavocracy that the senator had endured. 50 Storey himself was too young to
have experienced the fervor of the antislavery crusade, and, a crucial five years
younger than Holmes, did not serve in the Union Army. Storey defended
Sumner’s ideas when they were at ebb tide, but because he was diplomatic,
he never experienced the personal isolation that Sumner suffered during his
career.

As a young man, Storey’s racial attitudes hardly matched those of the abo¬
litionists. He met black people for the first time in Washington. “Nothing
amuses me so much here as the Negroes,” he wrote to his sister. “The older
they grow the less attractive they become and the less laudable their pursuits.”
These offending activities included selling oysters and the Sunday newspa¬
pers, and others of the race, Storey noted, served as waiters, one of whom he
described as a “gorilla.” Another performed buffoonlike antics, yet, “some¬
thing kindred in our nature makes me love him.” Storey was no zealot, but a
young man of the times whose vision grew with age. 51

Returning to Massachusetts to begin his professional career, Storey estab¬
lished himself as a successful and conservative corporation lawyer. He repre¬
sented railroad interests, and maintained a friendship with Charles Francis
Adams II, who served as the state’s railroad commissioner. He developed a
reputation as a skilled trial lawyer, and was elected president of the American
Bar Association in 1895. Throughout his life, Storey remained an economic
conservative. He opposed strikes and regarded labor unions with suspicion.
He was never drawn toward the anticorporate style of Progressivism and he
testified in Washington against the Supreme Court nomination of fellow
Bostonian Louis Brandeis. 52

In local Boston politics, he lined up with reforming Brahmin Republicans
who opposed what they perceived as corrupt practices by Irish politicians. In
1910 he backed James J. Storrow for mayor against John F. Fitzgerald. When
Fitzgerald ran advertisements alleging that Storey had earlier criticized Stor-
row’s business practices, Storey hotly denied the allegation. He spoke on
Storrow’s behalf at a meeting of African-American supporters at a Baptist
church. He opposed building a memorial to Irish favorite Benjamin F. Butler,

The Cases of Holmes, Lewis, and Storey 205

and in 1920 he spoke at a meeting of the Loyal League, which opposed Irish
independence. 53

Thus, Storeys anti-imperialism and civil rights advocacy were not
grounded in a generally radical outlook. Rather, they were rooted in a back¬
ward-looking defense of the early principles of the Republic. There is a cer¬
tain antimodernity about Storey, exemplified in his sponsorship of a tiny
organization decrying the excesses of automobile drivers. 54

Storey’s biographer, William B. Hixson Jr., argues convincingly that “the
decisive event in Moorfield Storey’s public career was the Spanish-American
War.” He opposed the declaration of war, spoke out during the war, and
especially criticized the imposition of American rule over the Philippines.
Supporters of imperialism argued that the Filipinos were incapable of gov¬
erning themselves. When Storey joined the anti-imperialist camp, the
movement took an agnostic position on this question; some among the anti¬
imperialists opposed American rule over the islands precisely because they
believed in the inferiority of Filipinos. Storey argued for the right of the
islanders to self-determination. Writing to Emerson’s daughter he declared,
“Here I am brought up under Lincoln, Sumner, Andrew, and last and best,
your father,” and he then asserted the applicability of the Declaration of
Independence to a variety of nationalist struggles. In a public speech he
stressed the educational level of the Filipino leadership, and the Christian
beliefs they shared with Americans. The process of declaring solidarity with
a colored people fighting for independence soon alerted Storey to the plight
of African-Americans, and reconnected him with his early experiences during
the Civil War and Reconstruction. 55

Storey lost an independent campaign for Congress in 1900, during which
he argued against colonialism and for civil rights, joining the two issues. A
speech on behalf of voting rights in March 1903, responded to Secretary of
State Elihu Root’s contention that Negro suffrage had been a failure. Quot¬
ing Emerson and Sumner, Storey insisted that the real failure was that of the
founders of the Republic, who should have abolished slavery at the birth of
the new nation. He traced the development of race prejudice to slavery, not
to inborn human traits. At the end of the Civil War, “the conditions which
confronted Congress were the legitimate fruits of slavery, and it was the clear
duty of the nation to make an end of the evil, root and branch, to lay the
foundation of a free society deep and sound.” This was, by 1903, a bold asser¬
tion of the goals of Reconstruction. Recalling the loyalty of the slaves both
to their masters and to the nation, he placed the corruption of Reconstruction
governments in the context of their times. The Negro politicians, he declared,
were no worse than the white ones. 56

2 o 6 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

Storey’s new outspokenness brought him to the attention of William Mon¬
roe Trotter, leader of the militant faction of Boston’s black community. As
early as May 1902, Storey appeared at a Trotter-sponsored meeting calling
for passage of the Crumpacker Amendment, which would reduce the con¬
gressional representation of states that denied equal ballot access, in accor¬
dance with the Fourteenth Amendment. Unlike most other future Boston
NAACP leaders, Storey continued to speak at Trotter’s meetings throughout
his career. Storey respected Trotter’s authority in the African-American com¬
munity and engaged him in dialogue, trying to mitigate the editor’s sectarian¬
ism. Trotter repaid Storey with flattering accolades in his newspaper and in
1918 arranged a testimonial dinner for him. 57

Several factors explain this unique relationship. First of all, Storey had no
prior connection with Booker Washington, whose policies had called Trot¬
ter’s newspaper into being. Other future Boston NAACP leaders, like branch
president Francis Jackson Garrison, had been confidants of Washington and
despised Trotter. Second, Storey was, like Trotter, a political independent,
and as often as not voted Democrat in the presidential elections. Finally,
Storey’s racial attitudes had changed enough so that he recognized in Trotter
a man of intelligence, character, and uncompromising self-sacrifice, the very
qualities he attributed to the Filipino insurgents.

More than anyone else during the NAACP’s early years, Storey guided the
association’s legal strategy. No prominent leader in the New York office, with
the exception of Arthur B. Spingarn, was a lawyer, and so Mary White Oving-
ton, John Shillady, Joel Spingarn, W. E. B. Du Bois and Oswald Garrison
Villard looked to Storey for advice on how best to approach the courts. He
contributed to three important Supreme Court cases—on voting rights, resi¬
dential segregation, and jury selection—and he helped to conceptualize the
NAACP’s attack on lynching.

This remarkable legal accomplishment was achieved by a man in his late
sixties and seventies, who was engaged in many other professional and reform
activities at the same time. Storey’s legal work for the NAACP was episodic,
for the association had no directing legal center in New York. This haphazard
arrangement meant that the association’s legal agenda was reactive rather
than proactive. The organization struck a promising blow for voting rights in
1915, but was unable to follow through on this front. As lynching and mob
violence against African-Americans grew in intensity (the number of lynch-
ings declined, but they became increasingly public and barbaric spectacles),
the association launched an antilynching campaign and dropped its voting
rights work. Storey and the NAACP accomplished what they did despite the
lack of a central legal team.

The Cases of Holmes, Lewis, and Storey 207

Underlying all legal problems confronting civil rights activists was, as it
had ever been, the federal system. Surprisingly, Storey defended states’ rights.
Speaking at the Jamestown, Virginia, Exhibition in 1907 (before the birth of
the NAACP), he opposed any attempt to shift the balance of power between
the federal government and the states in Washington’s direction. He saw this
as tampering with the Constitution, and suggested that President Theodore
Roosevelt was inclined to do just that. Similarly, he feared the expansion of
executive power at the expense of judicial authority. These notions, linked in
Storey’s mind, bespoke a legal conservatism that was at odds with his civil
rights activism. 58

The NAACP’s first victory before the Supreme Court came in Guinn v.
Oklahoma, in which Storey wrote an amicus curiae brief on behalf of a federal
case against Oklahoma registrars filed by the Taft administration. The regis¬
trars enforced a 1910 Oklahoma constitutional amendment that provided a
grandfather-clause exemption from literacy requirements. The government
argued that the registrars had violated the Fifteenth Amendment and won a
conviction; the defendants appealed to the high court. Two years later Chief
Justice Edward White, a former Confederate officer, upheld the convictions
for a unanimous bench. After the victory, which Storey attributed to the “very
able brief” prepared by the solicitor general, the NAACP was faced with the
question of how to proceed. The grandfather clause was dead, but how to
deal with literacy or property requirements without the grandfather clause? 59

Storey feared that the Fifteenth Amendment would have no bearing upon
such restrictions, for the southern laws were “so drawn that it would be im¬
possible for the court to say that they restricted suffrage only of colored men”
once the grandfather clause was omitted. This left the second clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment as an avenue of redress. However, Storey wrote in
an unusually long letter to May Childs Nerney in the national office, it would
“be difficult to get any law enforcing the Fourteenth Amendment passed [this
refers to the fifth clause], because it would disturb the basis of representation
in Massachusetts and other states which impose educational and property
requirements.” Even if such legislation were passed, the South might simply
accept reduced representation as the price of an all-white electorate. 60

Another problem in raising the issue was the sheer chaos a victory would
bring, which made such an outcome unlikely in the Supreme Court. If, for
example, a state without voting restrictions asked the Court to compel the
Congress to reapportion the legislators, it would probably be constitutionally
correct, but “this power the court would be very slow to exercise.” The prob¬
lem was simply too big to be solved judicially. Surprisingly, Storey did not
even consider that this strategy had already been tried and failed in the Con-

2 o 8 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

gress in 1901 when Indiana Congressman Edgar D. Crumpacker introduced
an amendment to a reapportionment bill, seeking to reduce the representa¬
tion of several southern states. One of Storeys first acts on behalf of civil
rights was to speak at a meeting on its behalf. The amendment itself was
never voted, and the whole bill, in which it was included, failed. Not until
the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the ballot returned to African-Americans
in the South. 61

Storey was still caught on the horns of this dilemma in 1919, when he wrote
in almost the same terms to James Weldon Johnson as he had to Nerney four
years earlier. The NAACP made little progress on voting rights in Storey’s
lifetime. The association struck down Texas’s white primary law in Nixon v.
Herndon in 1927. The NAACP essentially had a triage problem: too few doc¬
tors in the civil rights war zone. When a wealthy donor contributed funds for
an antilynching campaign in 1916, the association turned to that problem. As
Storey woefully concluded in his 1915 letter on voting rights, “It is after all a
question of power.” In that year the former Woodrow Wilson supporter
hoped for a Republican presidential victory, but did not “expect much from
the leaders of either party.” 62

The limits of judicial remedies against discrimination were manifest in
two cases Storey helped present to the Supreme Court regarding residential
segregation. Buchanan v. Warley struck down a Louisville residential segrega¬
tion law and was an important victory against de jure segregation. However,
when Storey aided Louis Marshall in Corrigan v. Buckley y the association
was unable to halt residential segregation by means of the private restrictive
covenant.

In Buchanan v. Warley (discussed earlier in this chapter) Storey contrived a
case in which a white property owner sued an African-American purchaser
who breached his contract to buy property for fear of violating the Louisville
residential segregation ordinance. Storey argued that the law violated the
property owner’s rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. Moreover, he
contended, the Plessy decision was not relevant in matters of housing. Al¬
though the argument was cast in conservative legal terms, Storey attacked the
underlying assumption of segregation, that the purity of the races must be
preserved. 63

Storey argued the case in April 1916 along with a Louisville attorney, and
hoped for a split decision at best. He suspected that two southern justices
were unconvinced, and if he reckoned that Holmes might dissent there is no
record of it. When the unanimous verdict was announced, he regarded it as
“one of the most important decisions on the colored question that has ever
been made,” likening it to the Dred Scott decision in reverse. 64

The Cases of Holmes, Lewis, and Storey 209

This was surely an exaggeration. As with the Guinn case, southern racists
defeated civil rights anyway. In the housing matter, the restrictive covenant,
by which white property purchasers agreed to sell their homes only to whites,
became the new method of ensuring residential segregation. The elderly Sto¬
rey advised the association’s Louis Marshall in Corrigan v. Buckley , which
challenged the restrictive covenant. Storey and Marshall tried to build upon
the success of Buchanan , but the Court decided that it lacked jurisdiction. 65

One of Storey’s greatest strengths as a legal strategist was that he saw the
evolution of the law in its social and political context. Where Holmes argued
this point in The Common Law , Storey simply assumed it. He never consid¬
ered that law might be “discovered” by dispassionate legal scientists. Unlike
Holmes, Storey was an activist who believed that social reality could be
changed in the court of public opinion. He put this precept to good use
during the NAACP’s campaign against lynching, the first round of which
began in 1916 and ended with the failure of the Dyer antilynching bill in the
Senate in 1922.

Although the number of lynchings annually was declining by 1916, the
practice was becoming increasingly brutal and public. When Boston philan¬
thropist Philip G. Peabody offered the association $10,000 to attack lynching,
the group assigned a small committee, headed by Storey, to work up a strat¬
egy. The philanthropist’s offer constituted a huge sum in relation to the asso¬
ciation’s operating budget and could not be ignored. Peabody soon changed
the offer to $1,000, with another $1,000 if the association could raise $9,000
on its own. If that was a less generous offer, matching funds do generate a
political imperative to broaden one’s appeal, and the Peabody fund accom¬
plished that for the association. Storey volunteered $1,000 of his own money,
and the fund drive began. A special Crisis supplement on the “Waco Horror”
after a brutal lynching there in July 1916 helped put the fund over the top. To
dramatize the proportions of this campaign, we may note that the next largest
special account contained only $300 at the time. Bostonians contributed sig¬
nificantly to the fund, which for six years was at the center of the association’s
agenda. 66

One possible strategy was to press for national legislation making lynching
a federal crime. At first, Storey discouraged this idea. He was still a careful
constitutional lawyer, and he would not advocate a law whose constitutional¬
ity was suspect. After the Waco lynching, Storey raised the idea of a national
conference, including southerners, to suggest appropriate remedies. He did
not want a meeting composed of northerners intent upon morally chastising
the South. This would only cause a “backlash,” he advised the national office,
“which is what happened in the [Leo] Frank case.” Without a change in

2io Boston Confronts Jim Crow

public opinion, “the grand jury would not indict, juries would not convict,
witnesses would not testify.” He was convinced that only when southerners
themselves were moved to action could the practice be stopped. 67

Little progress was made on the conference for several years. In the mean¬
time, Congressman Leonidas C. Dyer of Missouri began to prepare an anti¬
lynching bill in the wake of the 1917 East St. Louis race riot. This was a
strong measure that would allow U.S. attorneys to prosecute perpetrators of
mob violence, local law enforcement officers who allowed mobs to go un¬
checked, and the counties where the crimes occurred. The association's Joel
Spingarn, then a military intelligence officer, initiated a more limited bill.
This would make the lynching of servicemen a federal crime; Spingarn proba¬
bly hoped it might serve as a precedent for a more comprehensive measure. 68

Storey regretfully concluded that the Dyer bill would not stand the test
of constitutionality. The Fourteenth Amendment protected citizens against
states, but not against private citizens, and even if such a bill passed it would
fail in the courts. He was more sanguine about Spingarn’s proposal, but even
this he thought could pass only if advanced in a color-blind fashion. “If the
House believes that under the guise of trying to protect the soldiers we are
really undertaking to commit the government against lynching of negroes I
think the bill will never pass,” he advised the national office. The bill would
do better without the association’s public support. Storey still believed that
the association’s key task was to “start a movement over the South” to change
public opinion and state law. As the army was demobilized after the war
Spingarn’s bill was abandoned. Congressman Dyer waited to introduce his
bill. 69

Storey pressed again for the national conference idea in 1919. He wanted
“a non-partisan and non-sectional atmosphere,” urging national officer John
Shillady to secure such speakers as former Republican presidential nominee
Charles Evans Hughes, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, Alabama
Governor Emmet O’Neal, and others. Twenty-five hundred people attended
the Carnegie Hall conference on 5 and 6 May. Storey delivered the welcom¬
ing address and called for a publicity campaign on lynching to rival that for
women’s suffrage and the League of Nations. Hughes’s keynote address de¬
clared that the Negro’s participation in the world war demanded an end to
lynching, and proposed that the Covenant of the League of Nations begin at
home. 70

The conference did not demand federal legislation. Its “suggested objec¬
tives” called only for discussion of that idea, along with the possibility of
passing state laws, strengthening existing law enforcement, and generating
more publicity. At its conclusion, the assembly adopted an address to the

The Cases of Holmes, Lewis, and Storey

211

nation urging governors and law officers to take forceful action, but urging
upon Congress only “a nation-wide investigation of lynching and mob mur¬
der to the end that means may be found to end this scourge.” Hughes,
Palmer, former president Taft, former secretary of state Elihu Root, and
eleven governors, including two southerners, signed the call . 71

This meeting was undoubtedly an impressive achievement, and Storey, as
the Boston black community newspaper the Chronicle pointed out, was “the
single driving force who made the conference possible.” The organizer, how¬
ever, was disappointed by the aftermath. Many of the prominent signers of
the original call failed to attend, and of those who did, many declined to
work with the NAACP later. Meanwhile, the tide of violence continued to
rise; 1919 was the year of the Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Elaine, Arkan¬
sas, attacks against black Americans. Storey began to rethink his original
hesitation regarding the Dyer bill. 72

James Weldon Johnson and Joel Spingarn led the association’s campaign
for the bill in the House during 1920 and 1921. A few weeks before the bill
passed in a dramatic 230-119 vote in January 1922, Storey submitted a letter
that was read into the record by a West Virginia congressman. Storey had
now concluded that “the inaction of the states makes action by the United
States imperative.” This argument he based on the Fifth Amendment, which
simply states that “no person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty or property
without due process of law.” Unlike the Fourteenth Amendment, there is no
reference to relations between states and individuals, merely a statement of
the individual’s rights. If an American was lynched abroad, we would hold
the foreign government responsible, he argued. “It seems absurd to suppose
that the Government of the United States can not protect its citizens against
attacks made by men who are subject to its jurisdiction and control.” 73

A few months after the victory in the House, Storey addressed the Twenti¬
eth Century Club in Boston on the subject, making an eloquent appeal for
the bill, now in the Senate. Congressman Dyer and James Weldon Johnson
spoke the following day at Unity House in Park Square, urging the public to
pressure Senator Henry Cabot Lodge to vote aye. Storey and Lodge had
come full circle in thirty years, each reversing his civil rights stance of a
generation ago. Storey wrote a brief on the bill’s behalf for the Senate Judi¬
ciary Committee, which reported the bill favorably. The Dyer antilynching
bill, however, succumbed to southern obstructionism and parliamentary ma¬
neuvering, and, like the Federal Elections bill of 1890, died in November 1922
without coming to the floor . 74

Storey made one last plea before the Supreme Court in 1923; ironically
enough, the occasion found him and Holmes in earnest agreement. In Moore

2i2 Boston Confronts Jim Crow

v. Dempsey Storey represented six black Arkansas prisoners condemned to
death for their part in an exchange of gunfire outside a meeting of sharecrop¬
pers in 1919. Afterward scores of blacks were killed by vigilantes, sixty-seven
were sentenced to prison terms ranging from twenty years to life, and twelve
were sentenced to death. Storey argued that during the original trial the de¬
fendants had been tortured, and that a mob atmosphere pervaded the pro¬
ceedings. The original defense attorney had been terrified into resigning.
Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the decision in the case, which followed the
same line of argument he and Justice Hughes had employed in the Leo Frank
decision. The Court freed the six men, pending a hearing in the local federal
court. This validation of the principles of the Fourteenth Amendment placed
Storey squarely in the tradition of Sumner, who had contributed mightily
to the amendment. The defendants were ultimately freed, and Fourteenth
Amendment doctrines significantly strengthened. The elderly Moorfield Sto¬
rey had recovered for himself and the nation the inheritance of his city and
his youth. 75

Notes

PREFACE

1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in Three Negro Classics
(New York: Avon Books, 1965), 209.

2. For comparisons to other northern cities, see Ray Stannard Baker, Follow¬
ing the Color Line: American Negro Citizenship in the Progressive Era (1908; New
York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964); Abraham Epstein, The Negro Migrant in Pitts¬
burgh (1918; New York: Arno and New York Times, 1969); Florette Henri, Black
Migration: Movement North , 1900-1920 (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books,
1976); Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York , 1890-
19JO (New York: Harper and Row, 1966); Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The
Making of a Negro Ghetto , 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
3:967); Joe William Trotter Jr., ed., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Kenneth L. Kusmer, A Ghetto
Takes Shape: Black Cleveland\ 1870-19J0 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1976).

3. James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro
in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964),
and esp. The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1975).

4. An extensive historiography discusses Boston and abolition. An excellent
recent addition is Donald M. Jacobs, ed., Courage and Conscience: Black and White
Abolitionists in Boston (published for the Boston Atheneum; Bloomington: Indi¬
ana University Press, 1993).

5. Arthur Mann, Yankee Reformers in the Urban Age (Cambridge: The Bel¬
knap Press of Harvard University Press, 1954).

6. George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on
Afro-American Character and Destiny , 181J-1914 (1971; Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan
University Press, 1987), xiii.

7. See McPherson, The Struggle for Equality , or Aileen Kraditor, Means and

2i4 Notes to Pages 3-7

Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics ,
1854-1850 (New York: Pantheon, 1969).

introduction: what kept abolition alive in boston?

1. Comparisons of northern African-American communities may be found
in August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age
of Booker T. Washington (1963; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968);
Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920 (Blooming¬
ton: Indiana University Press, 1990); and Louis R. Harlan, Booker T Washington:
The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986),
94-106.

2. Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920 (hereafter Census) 3:77, Table 19.

3. Census , 3:27, Table 1; 3:35, Table 9.

4. Census , 1:76, Table 33; 3:47, Table 13.

5. Census , 3:457-58, Table 13; Richard A. Ballou, “Even in 'Freedom’s Birth¬
place’! The Development of Boston’s Black Ghetto, 1900-1940” (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Michigan, 1984); James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Black
Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Ante-bellum North (New
York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), 1-14.

6. Ballou, “Boston’s Black Ghetto,” 56, Table 2.15; Robert A. Woods, ed., The
City Wilderness: A Settlement Study (1898; New York: Garrett, 1970), 232.

7. On job rivalry, James Green and Hugh Carter Donahue, Bostons Workers:
A Labor History (Boston: Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston,
r 979), 55-71; William Foote Whyte, “Race Conflicts in the North End,” New
England Quarterly 5 (1939).

8. Florette Henri, Black Migration ; John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to
Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, 3d ed. (New York: Knopf, 1967), 443-46.

9. Al-Tony Gilmore, Bad Nigger! The National Impact of Jack Johnson (Port
Washington, N.Y.: National University Publications, n.d.); Boston Globe , 4 July
1910 (evening ed.), 3, and 5 July 1910, 4.

10. See chapters 5 and 6.

11. Womans Era (May 1895); Susie King Taylor, Reminiscences of My Life in
Camp (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968), 62; Colored Ameri¬
can Magazine 5, no. 5 (May 1904): 310-17; Boston Guardian , 12 August 1911, 1.

12. Boston Globe , 7 May 1902,1.

13. Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line\ John Daniels, In Freedom's
Birthplace: A Study of the Boston Negroes (1914; New York: Negro Universities
Press, 1968); Adelaide Cromwell Hill, “The Negro Upper Class in Boston: Its
Development and Present Social Structure” (Ph.D. diss., Radcliffe College, 1952).
This last work was recently published as Adelaide M. Cromwell, The Other Brah¬
mins: Bostons Black Upper Class, 1750-1950 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas
Press, 1994); Ballou, “Boston’s Black Ghetto,” 348-56.

Notes to Pages 8-14 215

14. Gatewood, Aristocrats , 109-13; quotation on 111.

15. See chapter 2.

16. Stephan Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the
American Metropolis , 1880-1970 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973),
192-93.

17. Elizabeth Hafkin Pleck, Black Migration and Poverty: Boston , 1865-1900 (New
York: Academic Press, 1979), 122-51.

18. Ibid., 151-57.

19. Daniels, In Freedom's Birthplace , 113—15; Thernstrom, Other Bostonians , 181.

20. Pleck, Black Migration and Poverty , 44-90.

21. Violet Mary-Ann Johnson, “The Migration Experience: Social and Eco¬
nomic Adjustment of British West Indian Immigrants in Boston, 1915-1950”
(Ph.D. diss., Boston College, 1992); Edmund David Cronon, Black Moses: The
Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Madi¬
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 206.

22. Daniels, In Freedom's Birthplace , 133-35, 185-89, 2I 3~ 22 > 308-97; Frederic
Bushee, “Ethnic Factors in the Population of Boston” (Publications of the Amer¬
ican Economic Association 4, 2 May 1903; microfiche ed.), 22, 31-37, 45-50,
101-20; Census , 3:1183, Table 15 and 4:367, Table 12; Peter C. Holloran, Boston's
Wayward Children y Social Services for Homeless Children , 1850-1950 (Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1994), 137-57.

23. Hortons, Black Bostonians, 27-66; Robert C. Hayden, “Faith, Culture and
Leadership: A Histoiy of the Black Church in Boston” (Boston Branch, National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Robert C. Hayden,
1983); Hill, “Negro Upper Class.”

24. Donald Martin Jacobs, “A History of the Boston Negro from the Revolu¬
tion to the Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1968), 22-29.

25. Ibid., 55-79.

26. Louis Ruchames, “Jim Crow Railroads in Massachusetts,” American Quar¬
terly 8 (1956): 61-75; Ruchames, “Race, Marriage and Abolition in Massachu¬
setts,” Journal of American Negro History 40 (1955): 250-73; William S. McFeely,
Frederick Douglass (New York: Norton, 1991), 91-103.

27. Robert P. Smith, “William Cooper Nell: Crusading Black Abolitionist,”
Journal of Negro History 55 (1970): 182-99; Carleton Mabee, “A Negro Boycott to
Integrate Boston Schools,” New England Quarterly 41 (September 1968).

28. I am grateful to Lance Carden, whose unpublished and untitled manu¬
script argues that Garrisonian abolition, with its insistence on interracial organi¬
zation, restricted the growth of African-American community institutions.
While I do not share this view, his manuscript at least called my attention to
this possibility. The Hortons present a more holistic picture of antebellum black
Bostonians: they see a range of different leaders among whom the Garrisonians
were one group. Jacobs shows how Garrisonian abolition encouraged community
development.

216 Notes to Pages 14-21

29. Stanley J. Robboy and Anita W. Robboy, “Lewis Hayden: From Fugitive
Slave to Statesman,” New England Quarterly 46 (December 1973): 591-613; Hor¬
tons, Black Bostonians , 97-114; Jacobs, “Boston Negroes,” 265-91.

30. Luis F. Emilio, A Brave Black Regiment: History of the Fifty-Fourth Regi¬
ment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1863-1865 (1894; rev. ed., New York: Ban¬
tam Books, 1992).

31. Daniels, In Freedoms Birthplace , 81-105.

32. The following notes in this chapter refer to very general points, all of which
have been widely discussed. The references are selective and only to those sources
I have used. Perry Miller, Errand Into the Wilderness (Cambridge: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1978); Edmund Morgan, Visible Saints: The
History of a Puritan Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1963); Darret
Rutman, Winthrop's Boston: Portrait of a Puritan Town (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1965).

33. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York:
Knopf, 1992), 172-73, 186-87; Thomas H. O’Connor and Alan Rogers, This Mo¬
mentous Affair: Massachusetts and the Ratification of the Constitution of the Un ited
States (Boston: Boston Public Library, 1987), 49-50.

34. Gilbert Hobbs Barnes, The Anti-Slavery Impulse, 1830-1844 (1933; New
York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964); Louis Filler, The Crusade Against Slav¬
ery, 1830-1860 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, i960).

35. Lawrence Lader, The Bold Brahmins: New England's War Against Slavery
1831-1863 (1961; Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1973), 87-111, 255-67; David Her¬
bert Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (i960; New York:
Fawcett Columbine, 1989), 106-12; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men:
The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (London: Oxford Univer¬
sity Press, 1973); William Lee Miller, Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in
the United States Congress (New York: Knopf, 1996).

36. Thomas H. O’Connor, Lords of the Loom: The Cotton Whigs and the Coming
of the Civil War (New York: Scribner’s, 1968).

37. Louis Ruchames, The Abolitionists: A Collection of Their Writings (New
York: Capricorn Books, 1963), 13-24.

38. In addition to works already cited, Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends;
Gerda Lerner, The Grimke Sisters From South Carolina: Rebels Against Slavery
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967); Irving H. Bartlett, Wendell Phillips: Brahmin
Radical (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1961); Archibald H. Grimke, William
Lloyd Garrison: The Abolitionist (1891; New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969).

39. Constance K. Burns, “The Irony of Progressive Reform: Boston 1898-
1910,” in Boston, ijoo-1980: The Evolution of Urban Politics , ed. Ronald P. Formi-
sano and Constance K. Burns (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1984), 133-64.

40. See chapter 6.

41. Cleveland Amory, The Proper Bostonians (New York: Dutton, 1947),
187-207.

Notes to Pages 22-32 217

42. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-
1923 (New York: Atheneum, 1963); Barbara Miller Solomon, Ancestors and Immi¬
grants: A Changing New England Tradition (New York: John Wiley and Sons,
i 9 6 5 )-

43. See chapter 3. Also Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black
Regiment (1869; Boston: Beacon, 1970).

44. Arthur Mann, Yankee Reformers , 1-23; Green and Donahue, Bostons Work¬
ers, , 55-93*

45. Robert L. Beisner, Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists , 1898-
1900 (1968; New York: McGraw Hill, 1971); Daniel B. Schirmer, Republic or Em¬
pire: American Resistance to the Philippine War (Rochester, Vt.: Schenkman Books,
n.d.).

46. George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of Modern
America> 1900-1912 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962); Arthur S. Link,
Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era , 1910-1917 (1954; New York: Harper and
Row, 1963).

47. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FD.R. (New York:
Vintage Books, 1955); Richard M. Abrams, Conservatism in a Progressive Era:
Massachusetts Politics , 1900-1912 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985); C.
Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South , 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1951), 369-95.

48. Florette Henri, Black Migration.

49. Woodward, Origins , 235-63; 321-49.

50. George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New Souths 1913-1943 (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 143-83.

51. Ibid., 170-86; W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia
and Virginia , 1880-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).

CHAPTER ONE: THE FEDERAL ELECTIONS BILL OF 1890

1. Amory, The Proper Bostonians , 17.

2. Stanley P. Hirshson, Farewell to the Bloody Shirt: Northern Republicans and
the Southern Negro , 1877-1893 (1962; Chicago: Quadrangle Paperbacks, 1968), 170-
259.

3. C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the
End of Reconstruction (1951; Boston: Little, Brown, 1966); Woodward, Origins of
the New South.

4. Petition of Ezra Nat. Hill, Misc. Doc. 244, Pamphlets Box 11, George
Frisbie Hoar Papers (hereafter GFH), Massachusetts Historical Society (hereaf¬
ter MHS), Boston.

5. Hirshson, Farewell , 202.

6. John A. Garraty, Henry Cabot Lodge: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1953),

218 Notes to Pages 33-40

3-87; Karl Schriftgiesser, The Gentleman from Massachusetts: Henry Cabot Lodge
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1944), 1-92.

7. Garraty, Lodge , 88-107; Schriftgeisser, Gentleman , 93-109; Hirshson, Fare¬
well, 168-89.

8. Hirshson, Farewell, 190-204.

9. Ibid., 200-205; Garraty, Lodge, 117-18.

10. Sigourney Butler to Henry Cabot Lodge (hereafter HCL), 21 March 1890,
Box 7, HCL Papers; Frank Leslies Illustrated Newspaper, 3 May 1890, in Lodge
Scrapbook, HCL Papers, MHS.

11. G. G. Alexander to HCL, 6 May 1890; Henry F. Downing to HCL, un¬
dated; R. Scott Parks to HCL, 30 June 1890; Albion Tourgee to HCL, 31 March
1890, 9 and 30 April 1890; Box 7, HCL Papers, MHS. All subsequent dates are
1890 unless otherwise noted.

12. Hirshson, Farewell, 204-5.

13. Boston Globe, 27 June, 3.

14. Curtis Guild Jr. to HCL, 11 July; Curtis Guild Sr., to HCL 28 June; Albert
Bushnell Hart to HCL, 13 August; Benjamin R. Curtis to HCL 11 October,
HCL Papers.

15. Boston Advertiser, 27 June, 1 and 4; 28 June, 4; 30 June, 1.

16. Garraty, Lodge, 90; Richard E. Welch Jr., George Frisbie Hoar and the Half-
Breed Republicans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 106 n. 20; Boston
Journal, 17 March.

17. Hirshson, Farewell, 211-14.

18. Meier, Negro Thought, 26-41.

19. New York Age, 25 January 1890,1; Emma Lou Thornbrough, “The National
Afro-American League, 1887-1908,” Journal of Southern History (November 1961):
494 “ 5 12 -

20. New York Age, 8 February, 4; 15 February, 1; Meier, Negro Thought, 70-71.

21. New York Age, 21 December 1889, 4; 28 December 1889,1 and 2; 18 January
1890,1.

22. New York Age, 14 December 1889, 1.

23. New York Age, July 1890, 6.

24. New York Age, 9 August; unidentified newspaper article 1890 scrapbook,
HCL Papers, MHS; Richard P. Hallowell to GFH, 5 August, Correspondence
Box 122, MHS.

25. Pleck, Black Migration and Poverty, 84; John Daniels, In Freedom’s Birth¬
place, 101, 103.

26. Clarence G. Contee, “Edwin Garrison Walker,” Dictionary of American
Negro Biography, 623.

27. New York Age, 23 and 30 August.

28. New York Age, 27 September, 2; 4 October, 1; 18 October, 1.

29. Welch, Hoar, 1-27.

30. Ibid., 28-144.

31. GFH to D. W. Farquhar, 12 August, Correspondence Box 122, GFH Pa¬
pers, MHS.

32. Hirshson, Farewell , 215-35.

33. Albert Clarke to GFH, 21 August, Correspondence Box 123, GFH Papers,
MHS.

34. White Citizens of Anniston, Ala. to GFH, 21 August; George M. Robbins
to GFH, 2 August; J. H. Crane to GFH, 4 August; Box 122, GFH Papers, MHS.

35. Welch, Hoar y 151-62; Hirshson, Farewell , 215-35.

36. Garraty, Lodge , 119-21.

37. Welch, Hoar, 162.

38. Boston Journal , 13 December 1889, 1 and 2; Boston Post , 13 December
1889, 1.

39. Boston Journal , 24 December 1889, 1 and 2; Boston Post , 13 December
1889, 1.

40. Geoffrey Blodgett, The Gentle Reformers: Massachusetts Democrats in the
Cleveland Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 86-94.

41. Boston Post , 14 February, 1; J. G. Oglesby to William E. Russell, 28 Decem¬
ber 1889, Box 1, File 17, William E. Russell Papers, MHS; Blodgett, Gentle Re¬
formers , 174-75.

42. Robert Lincoln O’Brien, “Journalism,” i n Fifty Years of Boston: A Memorial
Volume , by Elizabeth M. Herlihy (Boston: Boston Tercentenary Committee,
1932), 508-10.

43. Boston Globe , 19 December 1889, 4.

44. Boston Globe , 11 June, 5.

45. Boston Globe , 12 June, 1.

46. Boston Globe , 13 June, 1.

47. Boston Globe , 3 July, 4.

48. Geoffrey Blodgett, “The Mind of the Boston Mugwump,” Mississippi His¬
torical Review 48, no. 4 (March 1962): 614-34; Gordon S. Wood, “The Massachu¬
setts Mugwumps,” New England Quarterly (December i960): 435-51.

49. Tilden G. Edelstein, Strange Enthusiasm: A Life of Thomas Wentworth Hig-
ginson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968); Thomas Wentworth Higgin-
son, Army Life', Edward J. Renehan, The Secret Six: The True Tale of the Men Who
Conspired with John Brown (New York: Crown, 1995).

50. Joseph Edgar Chamberlain, The Boston Transcript: A History of Its First
Hundred Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 1-123.

51. Ibid., 160-70.

52. Boston Evening Transcript (hereafter BET), 2 December 1889, 4; 3 and 4
December; 4 and 6 December.

53. BET\ 26 December 1889, 4; 20 March 1890, 4.

54. BET 28 June, 4.

220 Notes to Pages 49-54

55. BET y 3 July, 4; 15 August, 4; 27 January 1891, 4.

56. Richard Peter Harmond, “Tradition and Change in the Gilded Age: A
Political History of Massachusetts, 1878-1893” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University,
1966), 319-20; Blodgett, “Mugwump.”

57. Lynn City Item y 12 September, 4; 10 October, 4.

58. Lynn City Item y 3 October, 2.

59. Lynn City Itemy 24 October, 3; 31 October, 2; Boston Globey 3 November, 1;
4 November, 4.

60. Lynn City Itemy 7 November, 2; Harmond, “Tradition,” 319-20.

61. Lynn City Itemy 7 November, 3.

62. Unidentified news article by George Frisbie Hoar, Correspondence Box
124, GFH Papers; Undated Typescript, Correspondence Box 12s, in “Jan. 1891”
File, GFH Papers, MHS.

63. New York Age y 15, 22, and 29 November.

64. New York Age y 7 February and 13 June 1891.

65. Harmond, “Tradition,” 320-27; Boston Globey 5 November, 4; Lynn City
Itemy 7 November, 4.

66. Barbara Miller Solomon, Ancestors and ImmigrantSy m-19.

67. Quoted in Daniel B. Schirmer, Republic or Empire: American Resistance to
the Philippine War (Rochester, Vt.: Schenkman Books, n.d.), 240; Garraty, Lodge ,
208-10.

68 . Ann J. Lane, The Brownsville Affair: National Crisis and Black Reaction
(Port Washington, N.Y.: National University Publications, Kennikat Press, 1971);
Curtis Guild Jr. to Theodore Roosevelt, 7 and 8 November 1906, Theodore Roo¬
sevelt to Curtis Guild, 7 November 1906, Box 24, HCL Papers, MHS; Boston
Guardiany 30 November 1907, 1; see, for example, Boston Guardiany 28 January
1911, in which the Guardian recounted alleged financial improprieties of Lodge;
HCL to Theodore Roosevelt, 20 June 1907, Box 88, HCL Papers, MHS; Boston
Guardiany 21 March 1908, 1.

69. John E. Bruce to GFH, 20 February 1895; GFH to John E. Bruce, 25 Feb¬
ruary 1895, Box 152, GFH Papers, MHS.

70. Blodgett, Gentle ReformerSy 206-15.

71. Edelstein, Higginson.

72. New York Age , 15 and 29 August; 12, 19, and 26 September.

73. Chamberlain, Transcripty 165; Edward Henry Clement to Booker T. Wash¬
ington, 2 January 1899, 5:5; Timothy Thomas Fortune to Booker T. Washington,
25 September 1899, 5:220, in Louis R. Harlan, ed., Papers of Booker T. Washington
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972; hereafter cited as BTW Papers); BET y
18 September, 1 and 4; 19 September 1895, 4; Boston Globey 19 September 1895, 1;
20 September 1895, 6. BETy 10 November 1898, 8; Boston Globe , 10 November
1898, 1; 11 November 1898,1; BETy 11 November 1895, 4.

74. Boston Globe , 10 November 1895, 4; 11 November 1895, 4; 24 September
1906, 1; 25 September 1906, 6; 26 September 1906,10.

Notes to Pages 58-63

221

CHAPTER TWO: BOOKER T. WASHINGTON

1. Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader ,
1856-1901 (London: Oxford University Press, 1975); Harlan, Wizard ; BTWPapers’,
August Meier, Negro Thought.

2. Louis R. Harlan, “The Secret Life of Booker T. Washington,” in Booker
T. Washington in Perspective, ed. Raymond W. Smock, (Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi, 1988), 110-32.

3. Harlan, Making of a Black Leader, 218.

4. Harlan, Making of a Black Leader, 42-43 (Ruffner), 52-77 (Armstrong),
126-27 (Olivia Davidson and Hemenway), 151-52 (Stearns), 238 (Higginson);
Henry Clay Alvord to Booker T. Washington (hereafter BTW), 4 June 1902, in
BTW Papers 6:477.

5. Harlan, Making of a Black Leader, 235-36; Booker T. Washington, Up From
Slavery, in Three Negro Classics (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 128; Max Bennett
Thrasher contract, in BTW Papers, 5:59; Harlan, Wizard, 290-91 for Park.

6. Adelaide Cromwell Hill, “The Negro Upper Class,” 101; Willard B. Gate-
wood, Aristocrats, no.

7. Dorothy West, The Living Is Easy (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press,
1982); Walter J. Stevens, Chip On My Shoulder (Boston: Meador, 1946).

8. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race 1868-1919
(New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 229.

9. Samuel E. Courtney to BTW, 27 October 1901, BTW Papers, 6:280-81.
Unfortunately, the African-American community newspaper for the 1890s, the
Courant, has not survived, except in very isolated numbers for one year.

10. Boston Evening Transcript, 25 April 1899, 7; Boston Evening Transcript, 10
May 1899, 4; Dickson D. Bruce Jr., Archibald Grimke: Portrait of a Black Indepen¬
dent (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 82-85.

11. Colored American Magazine (hereafter CAM ; May 1900).

12. CAM (May 1901).

13. Ann Allen Schockley, “Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: A Biographical Excur¬
sion Into Obscurity,” Phylon 33, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 22-26; Jane Campbell, “Pau¬
line Elizabeth Hopkins,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography 50, ed. Trudier
Harris and Thadious M. Davis, (Detroit: Gale Research, 1986).

14. Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of
Negro Life North and South (Boston: Colored Co-operative Publishing, 1900);
“Hagar’s Daughter, A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice,” under pseudonym
Sarah A. Allen, serialized in CAM (March 1901-March 1902); “A Dash for Lib¬
erty,” CAM (August 1901); “Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and
Southwest,” CAM (May 1902-October 1902).

15. BTW to Francis Jackson Garrison (hereafter FJG), 17 May 1905, BTW
Papers, 6:184; August Meier, “Booker T. Washington and the Negro Press, With
Special Reference to the Colored American Magazine” Journal of Negro History 38

222 Notes to Pages 64-68

(January 1953): 67-90; Walter N. Wallace to BTW, 6 August 1901, BTWPapers,
6:184.

16. CAM (January 1901); Lt. F. H. Wheaton, “A Feast With the Filipinos,”
CAM (June 1901); Capt. W. H. Jackson, “From Our Friends in the Far East,”
CAM (August 1901); Rienzi B. Lemus, “The Embattled Man in Action or the
Colored American Soldier,” CAM (May 1902); CAM viewed the African-Ameri¬
can soldier as part of America’s civilizing mission in the Philippines. Augustus
M. Hodges, “The Solution to the Negro Problem,” CAM (June 1901).

17. “Editorial and Publishers’ Announcements,” CAM (May 1900).

18. Harlan, Making of a Negro Leader , 262-64; Meier, Negro Thought , 108-9.

19. Charles H. Williams, “The Race Problem,” CAM (September 1901); “In
Columbia’s Fair Land: A Lesson of Barbarism and Injustice,” CAM (November
1901); James Parker, “Our Uncrowned Hero”; Robert W. Carter, “Our Late Pres¬
ident,” CAM (October 1901); Quincy Ewing, “The Beginning of the End,” CAM
(November 1901); “The Wilmington Lynching” CAM (August 1903); and “Jew-
Hating and Negro-Hating,” from the Boston Herald, in CAM (September 1903).

20. Harlan, Making of a Black Leader , 289-302; Meier, Negro Thought , 109-11.

21. Richard P. Hallowell, “Why the Negro Was Enfranchised,” CAM (Sep¬
tember 1903): 657-61; Hallowell, “Negro Suffrage Justified,” CAM (October
1903); Moorfield Storey, “Negro Suffrage Not a Failure,” CAM (December 1903):
909-11.

22. Harlan, Making of a Black Leader, 292-96; Murphy is described as a “white
Washingtonian” and “accommodationist racist” in Frederickson, Black Image;
M. F. Hunter, “The Alabama Conference,” CAM (June 1900); Robert W. Car¬
ter, “Shall the Fourteenth Amendment Be Repealed?” CAM (August 1900).

23. “Fair Play,” pseudonym for Kelly Miller, “Washington’s Policy,” CAM
(November 1903). The article originally appeared in the Boston Evening Tran¬
script, 18 and 19 September 1903. A 24 September 1903 letter from Miller to
Emmet J. Scott in BTW Papers, 6:292, shows that Washington knew the author’s
identity. A. Kirland Soga, “Call the Black Man to Conference,” CAM (December
1903 and January 1904).

24. Harlan, Wizard, 58-61; Meier, “Booker T. Washington and the Negro
Press”; FJG to Oswald Garrison Villard (hereafter OGV), 22 June 1909 in OGV
Papers, File 1446, Houghton Library, Special Collections, Harvard University.

25. Harlan, Wizard, 59-60.

26. All entries from Alexanders Magazine (hereafter AM): “Missionary Work
and African Education” (May 1905); “Storer College and its Achievement for the
Negro” (October 1905); “Tuskegee Celebration” (May 1906); “Dr. Washington a
Mason” (December 1907).

27. All entries from AM: “Negro Journalism” (March 1906); unsigned editorial
(July 1906): 10-11; John Daniels, “Book Notes and Comments” (September 1905);
unsigned editorial, “Dr. Du Bois and ‘The Moon’ ” (February 1906): 26; unsigned
editorial, “The Niagara Movement” (September 1906): 18.

Notes to Pages 69-75 223

28. All entries from AM: unsigned editorials (September 1905): 40; “The Polit¬
ical Situation in Massachusetts” (October 1905): 18; “A Manly Protest” (March
1906); “Voting Time” (November 1906): 11-12.

29. Harlan, Wizard , 333-34; James S. Stemons, “Mr. Taft and Negro Suffrage,”
AM (January 1909).

30. Unsigned editorial, “What of the Future?” AM (June 1906).

31. Harlan, Wizard , 295-304; Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line ,

3 ” 25 ‘

32. All entries from AM: unsigned editorials, “The Atlanta Mob Spirit” (Oc¬
tober 1906): 15; “The Negro Massacre at Atlanta” (November 1906): 15; “Good
Advice” (December 1906); “The Lessons of the Atlanta Riot” (December 1906).

33. Harlan, Wizard , 309-13; Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom, 441-42; Lane,
Brownsville Affair.

34. Joseph Smith, “The True Story of the Brownsville Affair,” (from Boston
Herald), AM (January 1907): 158-62; Archibald Grimke, “The Honorable Joseph
Benson Foraker or the Man and the Hour,” AM (May 1907): 31-43.

35. Unsigned editorial, “Co-operation vs. Antagonism,” AM (October 1906):
12-13.

36. Bruce, Grimke , 1-77.

37. Bruce, Grimke, 78-92.

38. Bruce, Grimke , 93-146.

39. Bruce, Grimke , 160-71.

40. Unsigned editorial, AM (September 1907); Archibald Grimke, “The Third
Term Spectre,” AM (November 1907).

41. Unsigned editorial, “The Negro Vote ” AM (July 1908); Horace Bumstead,
“The Ballot as a Whip,” AM (July 1908); unsigned editorial, “The Negro Vote
and the Presidential Campaign,” AM (August 1908); unsigned editorial, “The
Negro Shall Be Loyal,” AM (September 1908); unsigned editorial, “The Taft
Seance—A Hallucination,” AM (October 1908). Harlan, Wizard , 333; Charles W.
Anderson to BTW, 10 September 1908, BTW Papers, 9:621-22. James S. Stem¬
ons, “Mr. Taft and Negro Suffrage,” AM (January 1909); AM (March-April
1909).

42. Louis R. Harlan, “Booker T. Washington and the National Negro Busi¬
ness League,” in Booker T. Washington in Perspective , 98-109; Meier, Negro
Thought , 124-27.

43. BTW interview in Boston Journal , 11 August 1900, in BTW Papers, 5:594.
Boston Daily Advertiser, 17 August 1900, 5.

44. John Howard Burrows, “The Necessity of Myth: A History of the National
Negro Business League, 1900-1945” (Ph.D. diss., Auburn University, 1977).

45. Daniels, Freedom's Birthplace, 351-72.

46. Proceedings , National Negro Business League (hereafter NNBL), 23-24
August 1900. BTW to Emmet J. Scott, 8 July 1900, BTW Papers, 5:572 and n.
573; “Joseph Lee and His Bread Machine,” CAM (May 1902).

224 Notes to Pages 75-85

47. Daniels, Freedom's Birthplace, 368-70; Baker, Following the Color Line , 226;
Proceedings , NNBL, 23-24 August 1900; Souvenir Poster 1915 NNBL Conven¬
tion, Department of African-American Studies, Boston College.

48. Boston Globe, 19 August 1915, 4; Boston Evening Transcript , 18 August
1900, 6.

49. Harlan, “Booker T. Washington and the National Negro Business
League,” 106-9.

50. James M. McPherson, Abolitionist Legacy.

51. BTW, Up From Slavery, 164-67.

52. For Eliot, 4:174, Boston Globe, 4 October 1904, 8:79 in BTW Papers', see, for
example, William James to BTW, 5 June 1897, 4:292-93; Albert Bushnell Hart
to BTW, 3 January 1896, 4:98, 99, in BTW Papers.

53. William Lloyd Garrison Jr., letter published in Boston Transcript, 11 January
1908, in BTW Papers, 9:438; FJG to OGV, 9 January 1908, File 1445.

54. BTW Papers, 3:44 n.; Edwin Doak Mead to BTW, 2 January 1908,
9:429-30; Boston Transcript, 13 January 1908, in BTW Papers, 9:438-40.

55. FJG to BTW, 13 July 1903, BTW Papers, 7:205; BTW to FJG, 24 November
1899, 5:271.

56. BTW to FJG, 23 September 1899, BTW Papers, 5:211 n. 212; BTW to FJG,
24 and 29 November 1899; FJG to BTW, 17 October and 18 November 1899.

57. Harlan, Making of a Black Leader, 294.

58. Ibid., 297^-98; BTW Papers, Albert E. Pillsbury to BTW, 25 February 1900,
5:449; BTW to FJG, 27 February 1900, 5:450-51; Richard Price Hallowell to
BTW, 2 March 1900, 5:451.

59. FJG to OGV, 19 April 1905, File 1442, OGV Papers. Hereafter FJG-OGV
Correspondence from this collection, unless otherwise noted.

60. FJG to OGV, 7 April 1905, File 1442.

61. FJG to BTW, 8 May 1905, FJG Papers, Schomburg Collection, New York
Public Library.

62. BTW to FJG, 17 May 1905, FJG Papers, Schomburg Collection, New York
Public Library.

63. Harlan, Wizard, 359-79; FJG to OGV, 8 June 1909, File 1446.

64. FJG to OGV, 5 December 1909, File 1446.

65. FJG to OGV, 17 March 1911, File 1449.

CHAPTER THREE: THE LEGACY OF LUCY STONE

1. Alice Stone Blackwell, Lucy Stone (Boston: Little, Brown, 1930; Kraus Re¬
print, 1971), 3-102; Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Womans Rights
Movement in the United States (1959; Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1975), 68-70, 80-85.

2. Blackwell, Stone, 136-78.

Notes to Pages 85-94 225

3. Blackwell, Stone, 206-31; Flexner, Century , 144-58.

4. Blackwell, Stone , 256-72; Flexner, Century , 150-54; Mann, Yankee Reform¬
ers , 200—16.

5. Blackwell, Stone, 228-31; Flexner, Century , 222-30.

6. Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890-1920
(1965; New York: Norton, 1981), xiv-xv.

7. Ibid., 43-45, 162.

8. Ibid., 168-69.

9. Womans Journal (27 September 1890): 305.

10. Womans Journal (1 September 1894): 276; (27 October 1894): 340.

11. Womans Journal (3 November 1894): 348.

12. Womans Journal (10 and 17 November, 1 and 8 December 1894).

13. Blackwell, Stone , 232-36 for home life. A very large portion of Henry
Brown Blackwell’s correspondence concerns his real estate ventures; see Boxes 9
and 10, Blackwell Family Papers (hereafter BF Papers), Schlesinger Library, Rad-
cliffe College.

14. Election Ticket, BF Papers, Box 9, File 127; Henry Brown Blackwell to
Howard Blackwell, 4 April 1898; unidentified clipping dated 4 May 1895, B° x 10,
File 145, BF Papers.

15. Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper, eds. History of Woman's Suf¬
frage, 1883-1900, (reprint, Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1985), 4:735-39; Flexner, Century,
230.

16. Womans Journal (27 October 1894): 340.

17. Womans Journal (16 August 1890): 260; (8 July 1893); ( I2 May 1894); (3
August 1895): 244; (4 January 1890): 418; (27 October 1894): 340.

18. Alice Stone Blackwell to Emma Blackwell, 7 April 1893, Box 54, File 689,
BF Papers.

19. Alice Stone Blackwell to Emma Blackwell, 23 October 1901, Box 51, File
667, BF Papers.

20. Womans Journal (27 September 1890): 308; (9 June 1895); (23 June 1895).

21. Womans Journal (28 March 1903); Anthony and Harper, History, 4:343;
Kraditor, Ideas, 169-72.

22. Womans Journal (4 April 1903): 106.

23. Womans Journal (7 and 28 March 1903).

24. Womans Journal (11 April 1903): 116.

25. Womans Journal (2 May 1903).

26. Ibid.

27. Womans Journal (7 March 1903): 106; (4 and 25 April 1903).

28. Boston Globe, 3 November 1915, 1; Flexner, Century, 280.

29. Geoffrey Blodgett, “Blackwell, Alice Stone,” in Notable American Women,
1607-1930: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Edward T. James (Cambridge: The Bel¬
knap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 156-58.

30. John Daniels, In Freedom's Birthplace, 212-13; Census, 1920, 4:368, Table

226 Notes to Pages 95-101

13. Daniels’s chapter on “Economic Achievement” does use persuasive statistical
information on the income levels of black men and women, 333-60.

31. Daniels, Birthplace , 211; Boston Globe , 26 April 1915, 9; Richard A. Ballou,
“Even in ‘Freedom’s Birthplace’!” 51, Table 2.13, and 56, Table 2.15.

32. Adelaide Cromwell Hill, “Ruffin, Josephine St. Pierre,” in Notable Ameri¬
can Women , 206-7; “The Negro Upper Class,” 137; Clarence G. Contee Sr.
“Ruffin, George Lewis” and “Ruffin, Josephine St. Pierre,” in Dictionary of Amer¬
ican Negro Biography , ed. Rayford W. Logan and Michael Winston (New York:
Norton, 1982), 535-36.

33. Womans Era (March 1894): 4; Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Crusadefor Justice: The
Autobiography of Ida B. Wells , ed. Alfreda M. Duster (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1970), 77-81. Dorothy C. Salem, “To Better Our World: Black
Women in Organized Reform, 1890-1920” (Ph.D. diss., Kent State University,
1986), 8-21; Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women
on Race and Sex in America (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 117-30; Rosalyn
Marian Terborg-Penn, Afro-Americans in the Struggle for Woman Suffrage (Ph.D.
diss., Howard University, 1977), 102-36.

34. Womans Era (March 1894): 4.

35. Wells-Barnett, Crusade for Justice , 83-223. Wells and Duster discuss the
British episode thoroughly, suggesting that they wished to set the record straight
on a complicated exchange.

36. Womans Era , (June 1894): 8,14; (July 1894): 7; (August 1894): 1, 7; (Decem¬
ber 1894): 1.

37. Womans Era (May 1895); Salem, “To Better Our World,” 36-38.

38. Womans Era (June 1894): 5; (May 1895).

39. Womans Era (August 1895).

40. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color y 96-114; Salem, “To Better Our World,”
68-70; Wells-Barnett, Crusade for Justice , 258-61; Lewis, Du Bois y 235, 246.

41. Womans Era (April 1895): 8; (October-November 1896): 8; (January
1897): 8.

42. Boston Globe , 22 July 1894; Lewis, Du Bois , 107-8.

43. Womans Era (March 1894): 8; (August 1896): 8.

44. Womans Era (July 1895): 4; (August 1895); Peter Holloran, Boston’s Way¬
ward Children, 150.

45. Womans Era (March 1894); (November 1894): 8; (August 1895): 10.

46. Colored American Magazine (June 1900): 122; Salem, “To Better Our
World,” 84.

47. Wells-Barnett, Crusade for Justice , 225-32.

48. Boston Globe y 5 June, 6; 6 June, 4; 8 June, 6; 9 June, 4; 10 June, 5; Boston
Evening Transcript , 5 June, 6; 7 June, 7; 11 June, 4 and 6 (all 1900); Rayford W.
Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901 (New York:
Dial, 1954), 236-38.

49. Womans Journal (23 June 1900): 196.

Notes to Pages 102-113 227

50. CAM (August 1902): 273-77.

51. Clarence G. Contee Sr. “Ruffin, Josephine St. Pierre”; Adelaide Cromwell
Hill, “Ruffin, Josephine St. Pierre.”

52. Salem, “To Better Our World,” 68-72; Kraditor, Ideas, 213-17.

53. Dorothy B. Porter, “Baldwin, Maria Louise,” in Notable American Women ,
87-88 and Dictionary of American Negro Biography , 21-22; The Crisis (April 1922):
248-49.

54. Maria Baldwin, “The Changing Idea of Progress,” Southern Workman (Jan¬
uary 1900): 15-16; The Crisis (August 1915): 189.

55. New York Age , 14 December 1905, 7; 21 December 1905, 2 and 4; Bruce,
Archibald Grimke, 143-44.

56. See chapters 4 and 5.

57. Minutes, League of Women for Community Service, 1918-21, microfilm,
Schlesinger Library; Women’s Service Club Souvenir Program in Cora V. (Reid)
MacKerrow Papers, Schlesinger Library.

58. The Crisis (August 1915): 189.

59. Boston Evening Transcript , 10 January 1922, 5; 12 January 1922, 7.

CHAPTER FOUR! WILLIAM MONROE TROTTER

1. Stephen R. Fox, The Guardian of Boston: William Monroe Trotter (New
York: Atheneum, 1970), 3-13.

2. Ibid., 14-19.

3. Ibid., 21-30; Hill, “The Negro Upper Class in Boston,” 338-40; Boston
Herald , 20 February 1907; William Monroe Trotter (hereafter WMT) to John A.
Fairlie, 10 August 1893, B° x 17, File 3, WMT Papers, Mugar Library, Boston
University.

4. WMT to John A. Fairlie, 8 September 1895, Box 17, File 3, WMT Papers.

5. Fox, Trotter , 27-30.

6 . W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Three Negro Classics: ; Du Bois,
The Autobiography ofW.E.B. Du Bois (1968; New York: International Publishers,
1988).

7. Guardian , 12 August 1911, 1; 26 August 1911, 1.

8 . Wells-Barnett, Crusade for Justice , 375-79.

9. Fox, Trotter , 98-99, 209-10. Timothy Thomas Fortune also was an editor
and protest movement leader, but not for the course of his entire career. In addi¬
tion, Fortune did outside work as a freelance journalist for the New York Sun and
other papers to support himself. See Emma Lou Thornbrough, T Thomas For¬
tune: Militant Journalist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).

10. W. E. B. Du Bois to Alexander Walters, 7 April 1908, Reel 3, Papers of
W. E. B. Du Bois, microfilm edition, viewed at Boston Public Library.

11. An early expression of Trotter s independence from Republican Party poli¬
tics appears in the Guardian, 12 March 1904, 4.

228 Notes to Pages 113-120

12. Louis R. Harlan, Wizard , 323-37; Charles Flint Kellogg, NAACP: A History
of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People , Vol. 1, 1909-1920
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 155-58; Guardian, 21 March
1908, 4.

13. Guardian , 21 May 1904, 1; Harlan, Wizard, 348-49.

14. Guardian, 12 March 1904, 1 and 4.

15. “A Brief Resume of the Massachusetts Trouble in the Niagara Movement,”
1907 report by W. E. B. Du Bois, in Du Bois Papers, Reel 2.

16. Ibid.; Fox, Trotter , 64-66, for George Forbes.

17. Guardian, 27 July 1907, 1; Boston Globe, 29 August 1907, 3.

18. Du Bois, “A Brief Resume”; Minutes, Niagara Movement, 27 and 29 Au¬
gust 1907, in Reel 2, Du Bois Papers.

19. Guardian, 8 November 1907,1; Boston Globe, 7 November 1907, 7; Guardian,
28 March 1908, 1; Boston Globe, 26 March 1908, 10.

20. Guardian , 11 April 1908,1 and 4.

21. Alexander Walters to W. E. B. Du Bois, 4 August 1908, 11 August 1908;
W. E. B. Du Bois to Walters, 7 August 1908, 16 August 1908, Reel 3, Du Bois
Papers. Fox, Trotter, 110-14, relying upon pro-Washington newspapers suggests
a small and dispirited meeting, including the detail that James Hayes did not
attend and that Trotter claimed two hundred at the meetings. The Guardian
report is vivid, detailed, and reports Hayes’s speech to an audience of two thou¬
sand. Walters had reason to hope for a failure, but reports success. The white
Boston press generally corroborates Guardian accounts of Boston meetings, and
the detail in the Guardian seems persuasive.

22. Guardian, 31 December 1910,1; 7 January 1911,1; 14 January 1911,1-6; Boston
Globe, 6 January 1911 (evening ed.), 20; 7 January 1911, 1.

23. Guardian, 21 January 1911, 1, 4, 5; 28 January 1911, 1 and 4; Boston Globe, 7
January 1911, 1.

24. Fox, Trotter, 126-30; Kellogg, NAACP, 81, 93; Guardian, 25 March 1911, 4.

25. Guardian, 18 March 1911, 1; 25 March 1911,1 and 4; 1 April 1911,1 and 4.

26. Guardian, 18 April 1911, 1; Fox, Trotter, 137-44.

27. Guardian, 18 March 1911,1; 25 March 1911,1; Kellogg, NAACP', and Warren
D. St. James, The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People: A
Case Study in Pressure Groups (New York: Exposition Press, 1958).

28. Guardian, 1 April 1911, 6.

29. Guardian, 20 May 1911, 1; 5 August 1911, 1.

30. Guardian, 19 August 1911, 1; Boston Globe, 29 August 1911, 4; 30 August
1911, 5.

31. Fox, Trotter, 161-68; Kellogg, NAACP, 155-59; Du Bois, Autobiography,
263-64.

32. WMT to Woodrow Wilson, n March 1913, WMT Papers, Box 17, File 8.

33. Fox, Trotter, 168—87; Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive
Era, 1910-191J (1954; New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 63-66; Boston Globe, 13
November 1914,1; Guardian, 15 November 1913,1.

Notes to Pages 120-129 229

34. Boston Globe, 13 November 1914, 1.

35. Fox, Trotter , 185-87.

36. Ibid., 266-72.

37. Ibid., 201-6; Kellogg, NAACP , 87-88; Langston Hughes, for Free¬
dom: The Story of the NAACP (New York: Norton, 1962), 32-33; B. Joyce Ross,
j E. Spingarn and the Rise of the NAACP, 1911-1939 (New York: Atheneum, 1972),
46-48. Kellogg and Ross place Trotter at Amenia, based upon his name appear¬
ing on the literature, but Fox shows that he did not attend.

38. Theodore Kornweibel Jr., No Crystal Stair: Black Life and the Messenger,
191J-1928 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1975), 3-41.

39. Fox, Trotter , 214-21; Guardian , 28 April 1917, 1, 4.

40. Jervis Anderson, A . Phillip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (1972; Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 108, 247; A. Phillip Ran¬
dolph to Stephen R. Fox, 16 June 1969, Box 17, File 10, WMT Papers.

41. Fox, Trotter, 221-35; Guardian , 12 July 1919, 1; 19 July 1919, 1.

42. Boston Globe , 19 April 1915, 1; Guardian , 14 June 1919,1; 19 July 1919, 1.

43. Fox, Trotter , 251; Guardian , 4 February 1911, 4.

44. Boston Sunday Post, 8 November 1903, 10.

45. W. E. B. Du Bois to George Foster Peabody, 28 December 1903, Du Bois
Papers, Reel 2.

46. Boston Globe, 30 July 1903, 2.

47. Boston Globe, 31 July 1903, 1.

48. Boston Herald , 31 July 1903, 1; Boston Transcript, 31 July 1903, 1.

49. See chapter 2.

50. Guardian, 9 November 1901, 2; 8 October 1904, 4; 26 February 1910, 1.

51. Guardian, 8 October 1904, 4; 27 July 1904,1; 30 November 1907,1; 28 March
1908, 1; 27 April 1912, 1.

52. Guardian , 16 November 1907, 30; 7 December 1907, 1; 11 January 1908, 1;
Boston Globe, 4 December 1907, 14.

53. Guardian, 17 May 1902, 1 and 4.

54. Guardian, 30 April 1904, 1 and 4; Boston Globe, 23 April 1904, 2.

55. FJG to OGV, 9 and 18 November 1905, OGV Papers; Alexanders Maga¬
zine (January 1906); Guardian , 16 December 1905,1-12.

56. Fox, Trotter, 132-33; Kellogg, NAACP , 55-56.

57. For Alfred P. Russell, see Alfred P. Russell Papers, Mugar Library, Boston
University; M. Cravath Simpson appears often in the Guardian, for example, a
letter demanding that Booker Washington prosecute his attacker Henry Albert
Ulrich (16 September 1911), or her speech to a Jewish rally proposing an anti-Jim
Crow resolution (23 December 1911).

58. Guardian, 12 February 1910, 1 and 4.

59. Black Biographical Dictionaries, title 120, 433 (microfiche ed.): William
Newton Hartshorn, An Era of Progress and Promise, 1863-1910.

60. Guardian, 19 July 1919,1 and 4. Black Biographical Dictionaries, title 166,126
(microfiche ed.): Frank Lincoln Mather, Who's Who of the Colored Race.

230 Notes to Pages 130-138

61. Reverdy Ransom, The Pilgrimmage of Harriet Ransom's Son (Nashville,
Tenn.: Sunday School Union, n.d.).

62. For Grimke, see Bruce, Archibald Grimke\ for Forbes, Ransom, Pilgrim-
mage, 145.

63. Fox, Trotter , 266—72; Boston Globe , 11 April 1934; Boston Post, n April
1934, 4.

CHAPTER FIVE: BOSTON’S NAACP, I909-I92O

1. Kellogg, NAACP , 9-30.

2. OGV, Fighting Years: Memoirs of a Liberal Editor (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1939).

3. Washington, D.C., branch NAACP brochure, in Archibald H. Grimke
Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Room, Howard University, Correspondence Box
1915. Correspondence in this collection is boxed annually, hereafter correspon¬
dence from this collection will be identified simply by date, AHG.

4. St. James, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 17-55;
Ross,/ E. Spingarn , 16-80.

5. Kellogg, NAACP 136-37,155-275.

6. NAACP Branch Bulletin, June-July 1918, NAACP Papers, Library of
Congress Manuscript Division, Group I, Microfilm Reel C433. All NAACP Pa¬
pers for this period are in Group I. Hereafter, those NAACP Papers viewed at
the Library of Congress will be designated “LC”; others are from excerpted mi¬
crofilm edition viewed at Lamont Library, Harvard University.

7. Boston Globe , 31 March 1911, 4. The best recent discussion of Boston aboli¬
tionists and their relation to Boston is Jacobs, ed., Courage and Conscience.

8. Clarence G. Contee, “Butler R. Wilson and the Boston NAACP Branch,”
The Crisis (December 1974): 346-48; Clarence G. Contee, “Wilson, Butler R.,”
in Dictionary of American Negro Biography , ed. Rayford W. Logan and Michael
R. Winston (New York: Norton, 1982).

9. Mary Evans Wilson to May Childs Nerney, 1 and 29 December 1914; 5, 6,
7,11 January 1915, NAACP Papers, Special Correspondence, Reel 24; Mary White
Ovington, The Walls Came Tumbling Down (1947; New York: Arno Press and the
New York Times Press, 1969), 23.

10. Ovington, Walls, 23; W. E. B. Du Bois to Butler Roland Wilson (hereafter
BRW), 16 July 1915, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, microfilm edition viewed at Bos¬
ton Public Library, Reel 5; BRW to AHG, 12 November 1915, AHG Papers.

11. Mark A. De Wolfe Howe, Portrait of an Independent: Moorfield Storey,
1845-1929 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932); Ann Louise Leger, “Moorfield Sto¬
rey: An Intellectual Biography,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1968); William
B. Hixson, Moorfield Storey and the Abolitionist Tradition (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1972).

Notes to Pages 138-144 231

12. Moorfield Storey to Oswald Garrison Villard (hereafter OGV), n Septem¬
ber 1913, NAACP Papers, Special Correspondence, Reel 24.

13. BTWPapers, 5:449; Albert E. Pillsbury to BTW, BTWPapers, 30 July 1901,
vol. 6; Albert E. Pillsbury to Mary White Ovington (hereafter MWO), n January
1912, NAACP Papers C-73, Microfilm Reel 8; Albert E. Pillsbury to AHG, 24
April 1917, AHG Papers.

14. Clarence G. Contee, “Morgan, Clement G.,” in Dictionary of American
Negro Biography, 452.

15. May Childs Nerney to AHG, 7 December 1914, AHG Papers; Du Bois,
Autobiography , 138-39; Lewis, Du Bois , 105-6.

16. New York Evening Post, 16 December 1916, in OGV Papers, File 1453,
Houghton Library, Harvard University; BTW Papers, 5m. 94.

17. Kellogg, NAACP, 80-83; Francis Jackson Garrison (hereafter FJG) to
OGV, 25 and 26 March 1911; Boston Globe , 31 March 1911, 4; 1 and 3 April; The
Crisis (May 1911).

18. “Report of the Committee on Organization of the Boston Branch,” Box
G-88, File “Boston, Ma. 1912-1920,” NAACP Papers-LC.

19. FJG to OGV, 1 December 1911; Boston Globe (evening ed.), 29 November

1911, 6.

20. The Crisis, August 1911, 160-62; Minutes, Board of Directors, 6 February

1912, NAACP Microfilm Papers, Part I, Reel 8; FJG to OGV, 20 January 1912,
OGV Papers; Kellogg, NAACP, 120; The Crisis (March 1912): 203. The Crisis
probably erroneously lists George G. Garrison as treasurer.

21. Kellogg, NAACP, 199-200.

22. American Bar Association Circular Letter, 8 August 1912; Butler Wilson
to May Childs Nerney, 23 August 1912, NAACP Microfilm Papers, Part n,
Reel 1.

23. William R. Morris to May Childs Nerney, 5 September 1912; Butler Wil¬
son to May Childs Nerney, 3 September 1912; Moorfield Storey to May Childs
Nerney, 20 February 1913; NAACP Microfilm Papers, Part n, Reel 1.

24. The Crisis (August 1913): 191.

25. Boston Globe, 2 January 1913, 2.

26. Boston Globe, 13 February 1913, 11; David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered: Es¬
says on the Civil War Era (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 3, 20.

27. Link, Woodrow Wilson , 64-66.

28. Villard, Fighting Years, 216-35; Du Bois, Autobiography, 263-64; FJG to
OGV, 6 and 11 August; 6 and 31 October 1912, OGV Papers; Butler Wilson to
AHG, 12 November 1915, AHG Papers; Moorfield Storey to OGV, n September

1913, Special Correspondence Microfilm, NAACP Papers; Howe, Storey, 260-61.

29. Kellogg, NAACP, 159-65.

30. Moorfield Storey letter in Howe, Storey, 262; Fox, 168-79.

31. Boston Globe , 21 October 1913, 9; The Crisis (December 1913): 89; FJG to
OGV, 24 October 1913, OGV Papers.

232 Notes to Pages 144-150

32. FJG to OGV, 6 and 9 November 1913, OGV Papers; The Crisis (January
1914): 141.

33. Fox, Trotter, 168-87.

34. FJG to OGV, 29 October, 4 and 5 November 1913, OGV Papers; Buder
Wilson, “The Growth of Race Prejudice in New England and How We Are
Meeting It,” NAACP Papers, Microfilm Part 1, Reel 8.

35. NAACP Annual Report, 1914, 46; NAACP Papers-LC.

36. Boston Globe , 16 February 1916, 2.

37. Boston Herald, 13 November 1914, 13; FJG to OGV, 13 November 1914,
OGV Papers; The Crisis , (January 1915): 136, and (April 1915): 300.

38. FJG to OGV, 16 and 24 January 1915, OGV Papers.

39. FJG to OGV, 1 February 1915; Boston Herald, 8 March 1915, n; Kellogg,
NAACP, 181.

40. FJG to OGV, 9 March 1915, OGV Papers.

41. The Crisis, (December 1917): 91; (January 1918): 136-37; (April 1918): 283-84.

42. Storey to AHG, 10 October 1918, includes “Confidential Statement of Dr.
Barry, YMCA Secretary at Ft. Devens”; Storey to AHG, 18 November 1918,
AHG Papers.

43. Howard W. Coleman to John Shillady, received 13 January 1919; Nelson
Dukes to NAACP, 16 March 1919, Box G-88, “Fort Devens” File, NAACP Pa-
pers-LC.

44. Butler Wilson to John Shillady, 7 April 1919; Boston Branch Bulletin, Jan¬
uary 1920, Box G-88, NAACP Papers-LC.

45. Lewis, Du Bois, 506-9.

46. Butler Wilson to May Childs Nerney, 1 April 1915; Nerney to Wilson, 5
April 1915; NAACP circular letter, 7 April 1915; NAACP Papers Microfilm Part
11, Series A, Reel 32. Future NAACP Birth of a Nation correspondence is from
this reel.

47. Jack Beatty, The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley
(i8j4~i%8) (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1992), 172-75.

48. MWO to Joel Spingarn, 9 April 1915, NAACP Papers; Beatty, Curley,

180- 81; MWO, Walls, 128-29.

49. Boston Globe, 19 April 1915, 1; Boston Post, 18 April 1915, 1; Beatty, Curley,

181- 84.

50. Boston Globe, 19 April 1915 (evening ed.), 1 and 12; 21 April 1915, 1 and 4; 22
April 1915, 1; 23 April 1915, 18; 24 April 1915, 16.

51. Boston Globe, 21 April 1915, 4; 24 April 1915, 16.

52. Advertisement in Boston Globe, 27 April 1915, 4; Boston Globe, 27 April 1915,
12; The Congregationalist and Christian World, 22 April 1915, in NAACP Papers.

53. Boston Globe 26 April 1915, (evening ed.), 1; Moorfield Storey letter to Bos¬
ton Herald, in NAACP Papers.

54. Joseph Prince Loud to May Childs Nerney, 23 and 29 April 1915, enclosed

Notes to Pages 151—159 233

articles in Boston Post, n April 1915, and Boston Traveller, 23 and 27 April 1915,
NAACP Papers.

55. Boston Globe, 26 April 1915, 9.

56. The Crisis (June 1915): 88; Boston Globe, 3 May 1915,1; Boston Herald, 3 May
igISy Im

57. Boston Globe, 3 May 1915, 1; Boston Herald, 3 May 1915,1; William Brigham
to W. E. B. Du Bois, 26 May 1915; Du Bois to Brigham, 5 June 1915, Du Bois
Papers, Reel 5.

58. Beatty, Curley, 184-86.

59. Kellogg, NAACP, 107^16; Lewis, Du Bois, 466-500.

60. Bruce, Archibald Grimke , 185-213.

61. For example, May Childs Nerney to AHG, 21 October 1914, AHG Papers.

62. Butler Wilson to AHG, 24 December 1914, AHG Papers.

63. May Childs Nerney to AHG, 7 December 1914, AHG Papers; Du Bois,
Autobiography, 139-40; FJG to OGV, 8 April 1915, File 1453, OGV Papers.

64. Kellogg, NAACP, 107; Butler Wilson to W. E. B. Du Bois, 6 January 1916;
Du Bois to Wilson, 12 January 1916, Du Bois Papers, Reel 5.

65. George G. Bradford (hereafter GGB) to AHG, 20 April 1915, AHG Pa¬
pers.

66. GGB to James Weldon Johnson, 21 March 1918, Box G-38, “Financial
Matters” File, NAACP Papers-LC.

67. James Weldon Johnson to GGB, 27 March 1918, Box G-38, “Financial
Matters” File, NAACP Papers-LC.

68. GGB to Du Bois, 23 April 1919, in AHG Papers, 1919 Correspondence
File.

69. GGB to John Shillady, received 24 April 1919; 29 April 1919, Box G-38,
“Financial Matters” File, NAACP Papers.

70. The Crisis, December 1918, 71.

71. FJG to OGV, 2 January 1913, n October 1913, File 1451, OGV Papers.

72. Kellogg, NAACP, 31, 45 n; FJG to OGV, 19 October 1909; 18 January 1914,
File 1452, OGV Papers.

73. Butler Wilson to AHG, 12 November 1915, Mary Wilson to AHG, No¬
vember [no day] 1915, January [no day] 1915, AHG Papers; Mary Wilson to May
Childs Nerney letters, marked “received” 29 October, 1 and 29 December 1914; 5,
7,11, 31 January 1915, in Mary Wilson file, NAACP Papers Microfilm ed.

74. NAACP Branch Bulletin, February 1918, on microfilm at LC; Boston
Branch Bulletin, 20 May 1920, Box G-88, “Boston, Ma. 1912-1920” File, NAACP
Papers-LC.

75. Boston Branch Bulletin, 20 May 1920, Box G-88, “Boston, Ma. 1912-1920”
File, NAACP Papers-LC.

76. NAACP Branch Bulletin, June-July 1918 on microfilm at LC; Hayden,
“Faith, Culture and Leadership,” 8, 24-26, 38-39.

234 Notes to Pages 163-169

CHAPTER Six: THE LEGACY OF JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY

1. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995)
discusses African- and Irish-American relations in nineteenth-century Philadel¬
phia; Thomas H. O'Connor, The Boston Irish: A Political History (Boston: North¬
eastern University Press, 1995); Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of
Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York: Harper, 1991), 121-45;
Oscar Handlin, Bostons Immigrants , 1790-1880: A Study in Acculturation , (1941;
Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979).

2. George Potter, To the Golden Door: The Story of the Irish in Ireland and
America (Boston: Little, Brown, i960), 102-9.

3. Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (1969; New York: Da Capo Press,
1991), 131-33; BET 7 August 1875.

4. Potter, Golden Door , 371-87; William V. Shannon, The American Irish (New
York: Macmillan, 1963); the classic statement of this case is Handlin, Bostons
Immigrants.

5. Potter, Golden Door , 372-77; Francis Robert Walsh, “The Boston Pilot: A
Newspaper for the Irish Immigrant, 1829-1908” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University,
1969), n8,277.

6. Walsh, “Pilot,” 118-39; Dennis P. Ryan, Beyond the Ballot Box: A Social
History of the Boston Irish , 1845-1917 (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press, 1983), 130-32.

7. Walsh, “Pilot,” 147-76; Alan Lupo, Liberty s Chosen Home: The Politics of
Violence in Boston (1977; Boston: Beacon, 1988), 19-44.

8. Walsh, “Pilot,” 176-85.

9. Thomas N. Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 1870-1890 (Philadelphia:
J. B. Lippincott, 1966), 1-15.

10. James Jeffrey Roche, Life of John Boyle O'Reilly (New York: Cassell, 1891),
I - 1 03.

11. Ibid., 101-21.

12. Brown, Irish-American Nationalism , 85-100.

13. BET\ 7 August 1875, 2 and 4; Boston Herald , 7 August 1875, 2; Roche,
OReilly , 142, 152-54, 481-86.

14. Arthur Mann, Yankee Reformers , 27-44.

15. BET\ 7 December 1885; Boston Herald , 8 December 1885.

16. Roche, OReilly , 738-42.

17. BET, 13 April 1886, 2; Boston Herald , 13 April 1886, 2. Roche, OReilly ,
confuses this speech with the December 1885 speech.

18. BET\ 14 November 1888; O'Reilly, “Crispus Attucks,” in Roche, OReilly ,
408-14.

19. Boston Pilot , 18 January 1890, 1 and 4; 1 February 1890, 4; 8 February 1890,
4; 5 July 1890, 19 July 1890.

20. Roche, OReilly , 333-89.

Notes to Pages 169-178 235

21. The omitted journal is Donahoes Magazine ; a good case could be made for
discussing Martin Lomasney, Patrick Maguire as politician, or Patrick Collins.
All but Maguire have biographers. For Collins, M. P. Curran, Life of Patrick A.
Collins (Norwood, Mass.: Norwood, 1906); for Curley, Beatty, Rascal King; for
Fitzgerald, John Henry Cutler, “ Honey Fitz\ for Lomasney, Leslie G. Ainley,
Boston Mahatma (Boston: Bruce Humphries, 1949). The silence of these writers
on race relations suggests how far the question was from the minds of all the
protagonists.

22. Mann, Yankee Reformers , 44-51, reprises Roche’s life and wider views.

23. Boston Pilot , 1 and 4 November 1890; 8 and 4 November 1890; 27 February
1892, 4.

24. Boston Pilot , 17 January 1891; 24 January 1891; 31 January 1891.

25. Boston Pilot , 22 January 1898, 4; 25 August 1900, 4.

26. Boston Piloty 11 August 1900, 4; 25 August 1900, 4; 26 October 1901, 4; 8
August 1903, 4.

27. Brown, Irish-American Nationalismy 181.

28. Boston Globe y 29 November 1896, 1; 30 November 1896, 1; Blodgett, Gentle
ReformerSy 59, 141-44, 158-60, 165-70; Cutler, “ Honey Fitz y ” 68-71.

29. Republic , 15 February 1890, 4; Blodgett, Massachusetts Democrats y 97^-98,146,
I5I " 54 ‘

30. Republky editorials of 25 January, 4 February, 22 March, 19 April 1890.

31. Repub Iky 16 August 1890.

32. Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys (New York: St.
Martin’s, 1987); O’Connor, Boston Irish.

33. Goodwin, Fitzgeralds , 112-14.

34. Logan, Negro, 94-96; Congressional Record , 8 January 1901, 739-41.

35. Boston Globey 6 January 1910; unidentified clipping, 7 January 1910, Box 1,
Packet 3; unidentified clipping, 23 April 1910, Box 2, John F. Fitzgerald Scrap¬
books, Holy Cross University Library; Boston Globey 5 July 1910.

36. Unidentified clipping, 21 July 1910, Box 2, Packet 4, Fitzgerald notebooks;
Boston Globe, 23 April 1904, 2; 29 August 1907, 3; 4 December 1907, 14; 31 March
1911, 4. For Trotter on Fitzgerald, and his use of the Irish revolution as an example
for African-Americans, see the Guardian y 23 November 1907, 2 December 1911,
20 May 1916, 1; 28 April 1917, 1; 14 June 1919.

37. Beatty, Curley y 178, 184-85; Boston Post y 29 March 1917, 7; See NAACP
chapter for Birth of a Nation.

38. See Richard A. Ballou, “Even in ‘Freedom’s Birthplace’!”

39. Blodgett, Gentle ReformerSy 204-39.

40. Ralph M. Goldman, Dilemma and Destiny: The Democratic Party in
America (Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1986), 88-103; Beatty, Curley , 124-29.

41. Blodgett, Gentle ReformerSy 262-83.

42. Based on sampled readings of Republky 1892-96; 1900-1904.

43. Shannon, American Irish , 114-30.

236 Notes to Pages 178-187

44. The Reverend Mother Augustine [Eulalia Tuckerman], “Life of Arch¬
bishop Williams,” typescript, Archdiocese of Boston; Robert H. Lord, et al.,
History of the Archdiocese of Boston in the Various Stages of Its Development , 1604-
1943 (Boston: Pilot, 1944), 3:101-37, 161-83.

45. Harlan, Wizard, 82; Pilot, 17 January 1891, 2; 1 September 1900, 4.

46. James M. O’Toole, From Generation to Generation: Stories in Catholic His¬
tory From the Archives of the Archdiocese of Boston (Boston: Daughters of St. Paul,
1983), 80-84; Pilot, 4 August 1900, 1; Guide to Williams Papers, Archdiocese of
Boston, 26.

47. Mother Augustine, “Williams,” 643; Pilot, 18 August 1906, 4; James M.
O’Toole, Militant and Triumphant: William Henry OGonnell and the Catholic
Church in Boston , 1839-1944 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1992), 168.

48. O’Toole, Militant, 75—78. OToole describes O’Connell’s securing of the
bishopric as “the decisive nail in the Americanist coffin.”

49. Walsh, “Pilot,” 276-77; Pilot, 21 April 1906, 4; 9 September 1906, 4.

50. Pilot, 27 March 1915, 4; 3, 10, 17, 24 April 1915.

51. OToole, Militant, 167-68; the Reverend Richard J. Cushing, “Mother
Katherine Drexel and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament Golden Jubilee, 1891-
1941” (pamphlet); Sister Mary Leo to C. J. Sullivan, 15 September 1914; Sullivan
to Sister Mary Leo, 16 September 1914; C. J. Sullivan to Sister Mary Katherine
Drexel, 16 December 1914, all in Convent of the Blessed Sacrament File SI-109,
Archives of Archdiocese of Boston.

52. Pilot, 15 January 1916, 1.

53. Green and Donahue, Bostons Workers, 75-93.

54. Mann, Yankee Reformers, 175-200.

55. Logan, Nadir, 140-56; a recent discussion of racial exclusion in the labor
movement is Eric Arnesen, “ ‘Like Banquo’s Ghost, It Will Not Down’: The
Race Question and the American Railroad Brotherhoods, 1880-1920,” American
Historical Review 99, no. 5 (December 1994): 1601-33.

56. Ethel M. Johnson, “Labor,” in Fifty Years of Boston: A Memorial Volume
Issued in Commemoration of the Tercentenary of 1930, ed. Elizabeth M. Herlihy
(Boston: Subcommittee on Memorial History of Boston Tercentenary Commit¬
tee, 1932), 216-18; Robert D. Leiter, The Teamsters Union: A Study of Its Economic
Impact (New York: Bookman Associates, 1957).

57. Labor Leader, 26 December 1891, 1; 13 June 1891, 1; 11 June 1892, 2; and
1887-97 for general coverage.

58. Daniels, In Freedom's Birthplace, 328, 333, 343-78. By 1920, there were still
only 9,584 African-American workers out of 350,207, less than 3 percent of the
total, according to Census, Table 13, 4:368.

59. Boston Herald, 21 February 1894, 1; photo in Green, Bostons Workers, 82.

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE CASES OF HOLMES, LEWIS, AND STOREY

i. Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Common Law (1881; Boston: Little, Brown,
195 1 ), 1.

Notes to Pages 188-195 2 37

2. Charles A. Lofgren, The Plessy Decision: A Legal-Historical Interpretation
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Boston Globe, Herald\ Transcript, and
Post, checked for 19 and 20 May 1896.

3. Liva Baker, The Justice From Beacon Hill: The Life and Times of Oliver
Wendell Holmes (New York: HarperCollins, 1991); Sheldon M. Novick, Honorable
Justice: The Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), 198-99
for Foster.

4. Giles v. Harris 189 U.S. 479 (1903); Bailey v. Alabama 219 U.S. 219 (1911).
Holmes found for a Washington-sponsored plaintiff in Rogers v. Alabama 192
U.S. 226 (1904).

5. Baker, Justice, 105-53; Novick, Honorable Justice , 35-89; Oliver Wendell
Holmes to Amelia Holmes, 17 and 19 November 1862, in Mark A. De Wolfe
Howe, ed., Touched With Fire: Civil War Letters and Diary of Oliver Wendell
Holmes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1947), 71 and 73.

6. Baker, Justice, 163-245; Novick, Honorable Justice, 93-135.

7. Baker, Justice, 246-70; Novick, Honorable Justice, 135-60; direct quote is
Bakers summary, 257.

8. Holmes, Common Law, 1, 41.

9. Baker, Justice, 273-356; Novick, Honorable Justice, 163-77, 22 %~37-

10. Baker, Justice, 339-57; Novick, Honorable Justice, 267-73.

11. Brownfield v. South Carolina 189 U.S. 426 (1903).

12. State v. Brownfield 60 South Carolina 509.

13. J. C. May [Wilford H. Smith] to R. C. Black [Emmet J. Scott] 15 July
1903, in BTW Papers, 8:207.

14. Rogers v. Alabama 192 U.S. 226 (1904).

15. Giles v. Harris 189 U.S. 475 (1903).

16. Harlan, Wizard, 244-47.

17. Giles v. Harris 189 U.S. 475 (1903).

18. Ibid.

19. Harlan, Wizard, 247; Novick, Honorable Justice, n. 459.

20. Baker, Justice, 431-32; U.S. v. Shipp 203 U.S. 563 (1906); U.S. v. Shipp 214
U.S. 386 (1909).

21. Baker, Justice, 467-71; 478-81; Frank v. Mangum 237 U.S. 309 (1915).

22. Baker, Justice, 573-74.

23. Harlan, Wizard, 250-51; Bailey v. Alabama 211 U.S. 452 (1908); Bailey v.
Alabama 219 U.S. 219 (1911).

24. Bailey v. Alabama 211 U.S. 452 (1908).

25. Bailey v. Alabama 219 U.S. 219 (1911).

26. Ibid.

27. Pete Daniel, “Up From Slavery and Down to Peonage: The Alonzo Bailey
Case,” Journal of American History 57 (December 1970): 654-70; BTW to Charles
Dyer Norton, 6 January 1911,10:534-35; William Howard Taft to BTW, 8 January
1911, 10:539, BTW Papers.

28. Baker, Justice, 471; U.S. v. Broughton 235 U.S. 133 (1914); U.S. v. Reynolds
235 U.S. 133 (1914).

238 Notes to Pages 196-204

29. Baker, Justice, 473-75; McCabe v. Atchison , Topeka and Sante Fe Railway 235
U.S. 151 (1914).

30. Baker, Justice, 498-500; Buchanan v. Warley 254 U.S. 60 (1917).

31. U.S. v. Mosley 238 U.S. 383 (1915).

32. Baker, Justice , 595-97.

33. For Morris and Rock, Daniels, In Freedom's Birthplace , 61-62, 70, 73,
448-53; for Walker, Charles Sumner Brown, “Genesis of the Negro Lawyer in
New England,” Negro History Bulletin (April 1959); for Ruffin, Dictionary of Negro
Biography , 535.

34. For Morris, William H. Ferris, The African Abroad; or , His Evolution in
Western Civilization: Tracing His Development Under Caucasian Milieu (New
Haven: Tuttle, Morehouse and Taylor, 1913), xiii; for Benjamin, Black Biographical
Dictionaries , microfiche from Who's Who in Colored America , 281-82; for Wilson
and Morgan, see chapter 5; for Grimke, see Bruce, Archibald Grimke.

35. Ferris, African Abroad , 767.

36. Stephen R. Fox, The Guardian of Boston: William Monroe Trotter, 160; Peter
Shriver Jr., “Lewis, William Henry,” in Dictionary of American Biography {DAB),
supp. 4, 492-94; Clarence G. Contee Sr., “Lewis, William Henry,” in Dictionary
of American Negro Biography, 396-9 7, in clipping file, Cambridge Public Library;
Harlan, Wizard, 16.

37. Boston Globe, 26 May 1893, 4, in clipping file, CPL; Daniels, Birthplace,
95-96, 275; Fox, Trotter, 26.

38. William Henry Lewis (hereafter WHL) to BTW, 29 December 1902,
BTWPapers, 6:614.

39. Fox, Trotter, 45; Harlan, Wizard, 16-17, 3 2_ ^9i WHL to BTW, 16 Septem¬
ber 1903, BTW Papers, 7:285.

40. “Lewis, William Henry,” in DAB; quoted in Fox, Trotter, 159-60.

41. WHL to BTW, 2 July 1909, 10:141; 14 June 1911, 11:216; 10 December 1911,
10:406; BTW to WHL, 20 December 1911, 11:412, BTW Papers.

42. Boston Globe, 27 August 1912; Boston Herald, 28 August 1912.

43. WHL to BTW, 7 March 1913,134; 27 March 1913,148, vol. 11, BTW Papers.

44. Fox, Trotter, 108; BTW to WHL, 9 November 1908, 11:689; *9 J une I 9 I2 >
11:551, BTW Papers.

45. Ferris, African Abroad, 797.

46. Boston Globe, 13 February 1913, CPL clipping file; Fox, Trotter, 192-97.

47. Hixson, Moorfield Storey, 191-205; Leger, “Moorfield Storey,” 346-53.

48. Hixson, Abolitionist, 6-10; Leger, “Moorfield Storey,” 9-17.

49. Hixson, Abolitionist , n-15; Leger, “Moorfield Storey,” 27-33.

50. Moorfield Storey (MS) to William Monroe Trotter (WMT), 12 January
1911, in Letterbook 11, Moorfield Storey Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

51. MS to Susan Storey, 27 November 1867, quoted in Howe, Portrait, 43-44.

52. Boston Common, 17 December 1910, in Scrapbook; MS to Charles Francis
Adams, 19 November 1908, 1 December 1908, 3 March 1909, in Letterbook 10,

Notes to Pages 204-212 239

Storey Papers are random examples of correspondence showing friendly disagree¬
ment on the race question; “To the Voters of Massachusetts,” (1892), in Scrap¬
book 5, Storey Papers; Leger, “Moorfield Storey,” 50-89.

53. Boston Herald, 2 January 1910,1; handbill for 7 January 1910 meeting; Boston
Evening Transcript , 31 March 1911, Scrapbook 3, Storey Papers.

54. Boston Evening Transcript , n November 1911, in Scrapbook 3, Storey Papers
for auto club.

55. Hixson, Abolitionist , 45-97, direct quote, 59.

56. Moorfield Storey, ‘’Negro Suffrage Is Not a Failure,” Colored American
Magazine (December 1903): 909-11.

57. MS to Horace Bumstead, 27 January 1911, MS to WMT, 12 January and 16
March 1911, Letterbook 12; MS to WMT, 11 March 1909,18 March 1909, Letter-
book 10; 23 April 1912, Letterbook 13 in Storey Papers; 16 September 1913, in
Howe, Independent , 261; Boston Guardian , 23 February 1918; Guardian , n.d.,
Scrapbook 5, Storey Papers.

58. Springfield Republican , 30 June 1907, Scrapbook 3, Storey Papers.

59. Baker, Justice, 482-83; Hixson, Abolitionist, 136-37; MS to Joel Spingarn, 12
July 1915, Letterbook 17, Storey Papers.

60. MS to May Childs Nerney, 6 August 1915, Letterbook 17, Storey Papers.

61. MS to Turner K. Hackman, 20 September 1916, Letterbook 18, Storey Pa¬
pers; Logan, Negro, 94-96.

62. MS to James Weldon Johnson, 18 December 1919, in Special Correspon¬
dence, Part I, Reel 24, microfilm papers of the NAACP.

63. Hixson, Abolitionist, 139-42.

64. MS to Robert L. O’Brien, 6 November 1917; MS to OGV, 6 November
1917, Letterbook 20, Storey Papers.

65. Hixson, Abolitionist, 142-44.

66. Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909-1950
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 28-29.

67. MS to Roy Nash, 16 October 1916, Letterbook 18, Storey Papers.

68. Hixson, Abolitionist, 163.

69. MS to Walter White, 11 July 1918, Special Correspondence, Part I, reel 24,
microfilm NAACP Papers; 16 July 1918 to John R. Shillady, Letterbook 20, Sto¬
rey Papers.

70. MS to John R. Shillady, 29 March 1919, Letterbook 20 in Storey Papers;
New York Evening Post and New York Times, undated, Scrapbook 5, Storey Pa¬
pers.

71. Program, National Conference on Lynching; Conference Address to Na¬
tion, Scrapbook 5, Storey papers.

72. Boston Chronicle, 10 May 1919; typescript MS speech to Detroit NAACP,
26 June 1921 or i922(?).

73. Congressional Record, 10 January 1922, Scrapbook 5, Storey Papers.

74. Boston Herald, 23 and 24 April 1922, Scrapbook 5; Hixson, Abolitionist,

i 65 “ 75 -

75. Hixson, Abolitionist, 181-84; Baker , Justice, 574.

Selected Bibliography

PRIMARY SOURCES

Manuscript Collections

Archives of the Archdiocese of Boston

Blackwell Family Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College
W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, microfilm edition, Boston Public Library
John F. Fitzgerald Scrapbooks, Library of the College of the Holy Cross
Francis Jackson Garrison Papers, Schomburg Collection, New York Public
Library

Archibald H. Grimke Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Room, Howard University
George Frisbie Hoar Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society
Oliver Wendell Holmes Papers, Harvard University Law School
League of Women for Community Service Collection, Schlesinger Library, Rad¬
cliffe College

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Papers, microfilm
edition

NAACP Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress

Cora V. Reid (MacKerrow) Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College

Alfred Russell Papers, Mugar Library, Boston University

William E. Russell Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society

Moorfield Storey Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society

William Monroe Trotter Papers, Mugar Library, Boston University

Oswald Garrison Villard Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University

Cases

Bailey v. Alabama 211 U.S. 452 (1908)

Bailey v. Alabama 219 U.S. 219 (1911)

Brownfield v. South Carolina 189 U.S. 426 (1903)

Giles v. Harris 189 U.S. 479 (1903)

McCabe v. Atchison , Topeka and Santa Fe Railway 235 U.S. 151 (1914)

242 Selected Bibliography

Rogers v. Alabama 192 U.S. 226 (1904)

State v. Brownfield 60 South Carolina 509

US. v. Broughton and U.S. v. Reynolds 235 U.S. 133 (1914)

SECONDARY SOURCES

Books

Abrams, Richard M. Conservatism in A Progressive Era: Massachusetts Politics ,
7900-/9/2. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985.

Ainley, Leslie G. Boston Mahatma. Boston: Bruce Humphries, 1949.

Amory, Cleveland. The Proper Bostonians. New York: Dutton, 1947.

Anderson, Jervis. A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait. 1972. Reprint,
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986.

Anthony, Susan B., and Ida Husted Harper, eds. History of Woman Suffrage.
Vols. 4 and 5. Reprint, Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1985.

Ayers, Edward L. The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Baker, Liva. The Justice From Beacon Hill: The Life and Times of Oliver Wendell
Holmes. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Baker, Ray Stannard. Following the Color Line: American Negro Citizenship in the
Progressive Era. 1908. Reprint, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964.

Barnes, Gilbert Hobbs. The Anti-Slavery Impulse, 18J0-1844. 1933. Reprint, New
York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964.

Bartlett, Irving H. Wendell Phillips: Brahmin Radical. Westport, Conn.: Green¬
wood, 1961.

Beatty, Jack. The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley (1874-
i%8). Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1992.

Beisner, Robert L. Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists , 1898-1900.
1968. Reprint, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971.

Blackwell, Alice Stone. Lucy Stone. Boston: Little, Brown, 1930; Kraus Reprint,
I971 ‘

Blodgett, Geoffrey. The Gentle Reformers: Massachusetts Democrats in the Cleve¬
land Era. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966.

Bontemps, Arna. One Hundred Years of Negro Freedom. New York: Dodd, Mead,
1961.

Broderick, Francis L. W. E. B. Du Bois: Negro Leader in a Time of Crisis. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1959.

Brown, Thomas N. Irish-American Nationalism , 1870-1890. Philadelphia: J. B.
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Cronon, Edmund David. Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Uni¬
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I975 \

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244 Selected Bibliography

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-. Booker T. Washington in Perspective: Essays of Louis R. Harlan. Edited by

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Hennessy, Michael E. Four Decades of Massachusetts Politics, 1890-1955. Norwood,
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Selected Bibliography 245

Hirshson, Stanley P. Farewell to the Bloody Shirt: Northern Republicans and the
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-, ed. Touched With Fire: Civil War Letters and Diary of Oliver Wendell

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Hughes, Langston. Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP. New York: Nor¬
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Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Jacobs, Donald Martin, ed. Courage and Conscience: Black and White Abolitionists
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Johnson, James Weldon. Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon John¬
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246 Selected Bibliography

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Lane, Ann J. The Brownsville Affair: National Crisis and Black Reaction. Port
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Levy, Leonard W. The Law of the Commonwealth and Chief Justice Shaw. New
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Logan, Rayford W. The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir , i8jj-
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Lord, Robert H., John E. Sexton, and Edward Harrington. History of the Archdio¬
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Mann, Arthur. Yankee Reformers in the Urban Age. Cambridge: The Belknap
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Civil War and Reconstruction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964.

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Princeton University Press, 1975.

Meier, August. Negro Thought in America , 1880-1913: Racial Ideologies in the Age
of Booker T. Washington. 1963. Reprint, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1968.

Miller, Perry. Errand Into the Wilderness. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Har¬
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Selected Bibliography 247

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Little, Brown, 1989.

O’Connor, Thomas H. Lords of the Loom: The Cotton Whigs and the Coming of
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--. Bibles , Brahmins , and Bosses: A Short History of Boston. 3d rev. ed. Boston:

Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston, 1991.

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Osofsky, Gilbert. Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto , Negro New York; 1890-1930.
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Henry Regnery, 1955.

Ovington, Mary White. The Walls Came Tumbling Down. New York: Arno Press
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Pleck, Elizabeth Hafkin. Black Migration and Poverty: Boston , 1863-1900. New
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Potter, George. To the Golden Door: The Story of the Irish in Ireland and America.
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Quarles, Benjamin. Black Abolitionists. 1969. Reprint, New York: Da Capo, 1991.
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John Brown. New York: Crown, 1995.

Roche, James Jeffrey. Life of John Boyle O'Reilly. New York: Cassell, 1891.

Ross, B. Joyce. J. E. Spingarn and the Rise of the NAACP } 1911-1939. New York:
Atheneum, 1972.

Ruchames, Louis. The Abolitionists: A Collection of Their Writings. New York:
Capricorn Books, 1963.

Rutman, Darret. Winthrop's Boston: Portrait of a Puritan Town. Chapel Hill: Uni¬
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Ryan, Dennis P. Beyond the Ballot Box: A Social History of the Boston Irish y 1843-
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St. James, Warren D. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored
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248 Selected Bibliography

Schirmer, Daniel B. Republic or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War\
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Schriftgiesser, Karl. The Gentleman From Massachusetts: Henry Cabot Lodge. Bos¬
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Shannon, William V. The American Irish. New York: Macmillan, 1963.

Solomon, Barbara Miller. Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing New England
Tradition. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1965.

Spear, Allan H. Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto , 1890-1920. Chi¬
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.

Stevens, Walter J. Chip On My Shoulder. Boston: Meador, 1946.

Taylor, Susie King. Reminiscences of My Life in Camp. New York: Arno Press and
the New York Times, 1968.

Thernstrom, Stephan. The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American
Metropolis , 1880-1970. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973.

Thornbrough, Emma Lou. T. Thomas Fortune: Militant Journalist. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1972.

Three Negro Classics: Up From Slavery. The Souls of Black Folk. The Autobiography
of an Ex-Colored Man. With an Introduction by John Hope Franklin. New
York: Avon, 1965.

Tindall, George Brown. The Emergence of the New Souths 1913-1943. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967.

Trotter, Joe William Jr. The Great Migration in Historical Perspective. Blooming¬
ton: Indiana University Press, 1991.

Villard, Oswald Garrison. Fighting Years: Memoirs of a Liberal Editor. New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1939.

Welch, Richard E. Jr. George Frisbie Hoar and the Half-Breed Republicans. Cam¬
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1971.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Crusadefor Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. Edited
by Alfreda M. Duster. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

West, Dorothy. The Living Is Easy. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1982.

Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Knopf,
1992.

Woods, Robert A., ed. The City Wilderness: A Settlement Study. 1898. Reprint,
New York: Garrett, 1970.

Woodward, C. Vann. Origins of the New South , 1877-1913. Baton Rouge: Louisi¬
ana State University Press, 1951.

-. Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruc¬
tion. 1951. Reprint, Boston: Little, Brown, 1966.

-. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. 3d rev. ed. 1955. Reprint, New York:

Oxford University Press, 1974.

Zangrando, Robert L. The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909-1930. Phila¬
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Selected Bibliography 249

Pamphlets and Unpublished Manuscripts

The Reverend Mother Augustine [Eulalia Tuckerman]. “Life of Archbishop
Williams.” Archdiocese of Boston.

Ballou, Richard A. “Even in ‘Freedom’s Birthplace’! The Development of Bos¬
ton’s Black Ghetto, 1900-1940.” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1984.

Burrows, John Howard. “The Necessity of Myth: A History of the National
Negro Business League, 1900-1945.” Ph.D. diss., Auburn University, 1977.

Harmond, Richard Peter. “Tradition and Change in the Gilded Age: A Political
History of Massachusetts, 1878-1893.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University,
1966.

Hayden, Robert C. “Boston’s NAACP History, 1910-1982.” Pamphlet published
by Boston Branch, NAACP, 1982.

—-. “Faith, Culture and Leadership: A History of the Black Church in Bos¬

ton.” Pamphlet published by Boston Branch, NAACP, and Robert C. Hay¬
den, 1983.

Hill, Adelaide Cromwell. “The Negro Upper Class in Boston: Its Development
and Present Structure.” Ph.D. diss., Radcliffe College, 1952.

Jacobs, Donald Martin. “A History of the Boston Negro from the Revolution to
the Civil War.” Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1968.

Johnson, Violet Mary-Ann. “The Migration Experience: Social and Economic
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Leger, Ann Louise. “Moorfield Storey: An Intellectual Biography.” Ph.D. diss.,
University of Iowa, 1968.

Salem, Dorothy C. “To Better Our World: Black Women in Organized Reform,
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Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn Marian. “Afro-Americans in the Struggle for Woman
Suffrage.” Ph.D. diss., Howard University, 1977.

Walsh, Francis Robert. “The Boston Pilot: A Newspaper for the Irish Immi¬
grant, 1829-1908.” Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1969.

Articles

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Baldwin, Maria. “The Changing Idea of Progress.” Southern Workman (January
1900): 15-16.

Blodgett, Geoffrey. “The Mind of the Boston Mugwump.” Mississippi Historical
Review 48, no. 4 (March 1962): 614-34.

Brown, Charles Sumner. “Genesis of the Negro Lawyer in New England.” Negro
History Bulletin (April 1959).

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Bushee, Frederic. “Ethnic Factors in the Population of Boston.” Publications of
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Daniel, Pete. “Up From Slavery and Down to Peonage: The Alonzo Bailey
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Mabee, Carleton. “A Negro Boycott to Integrate Boston Schools.” New England
Quarterly 41 (September 1968).

Meier, August. “Booker T. Washington and the Negro Press, With Special Ref¬
erence to the Colored American Magazine.” Journal of Negro History 38 (Janu¬
ary 1953): 67-90.

Robboy, Stanley J., and Anita W. Robboy. “Lewis Hayden: From Fugitive Slave
to Statesman.” New England Quarterly 46 (December 1973): 591-613.

Ruchames, Louis. “Race, Marriage and Abolition in Massachusetts.” Journal of
American Negro History 40 (1955): 250-73.

-. “Jim Crow Railroads in Massachusetts.” American Quarterly 8 (1956):

6l ~ 75 '

Schockley, Ann Allen. “Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: A Biographical Excursion
Into Obscurity.” Phylon 33, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 22-26.

Smith, Robert P. “William Cooper Nell: Crusading Black Abolitionist.” Journal
of Negro History 55 (1970): 182-99.

Thornbrough, Emma Lou. “The National Afro-American League, 1887-1908.”
Journal of Southern History (November 1961): 494-512.

Welch, Richard E. “Opponents and Colleagues: George Frisbie Hoar and Henry
Cabot Lodge, 1898-1904.” New England Quarterly (June 1966): 182-209.

Whyte, William Foote. “Race Conflicts in the North End.” New England Quar¬
terly 5 (1939).

Wood, Gordon S. “The Massachusetts Mugwumps.” New England Quarterly
(December i960): 435-51.

Index

Abbott, Lyman, 65

Abolitionist Legacy , The (McPherson), x,
76

Abolitionists (see also Antislavery move¬
ment; Neo-abolitionists); Boston
blacks and, 13-14; Henry Blackwell
and, 83; legacy of, ix-x, 19-20; Lucy
Stone and, 83, 84-85; in Massachu¬
setts, 12, 18, 19-20; Moorfield Storey
and, 203; opposition to, 164-65; wan¬
ing of, 22; William Monroe Trotter
and, m-12; Womans Journal and,
89-90

Abrahams, Henry, 182
Adams, Charles Francis, 46
Adams, John Quincy, 17
African-American women’s club move¬
ment: antilynching campaign and, 96;
in Boston, 94-95, 96-98; national,
96-98; traditional values of, 99; Wil¬
liam Monroe Trotter and, 129
African-Americans (see Blacks)
Afro-American Council, 60, 73
Alabama: criminal-surety system and,
195; debt law and, 194-95; disfran¬
chisement and, 191-92
Alexander, Charles, 67—73
Alexander, Walter, 62
Alexanders Magazine: Archibald Grimke

at, 67, 71-72; Booker T. Washington
and, 67-73; white writers at, 67-68
Allen, Isaac B., 73
American Bar Association, 141-42,
200-201

American Federation of Labor, 182
American Revolution: antislavery move¬
ment and, 16-17

American Woman’s Suffrage Associa¬
tion, 85, 86
Ames, R. L., 75
Andrew, John F., 46, 49
Anthony, Susan B., 85, 91,100
Antilynching campaigns (see also Lynch¬
ing); African-American women’s club
movement and, 96; Dyer bill and,
210-11; Fifth Amendment and, 211;
Fourteenth Amendment and, 210; Ida
B. Wells and, 26, 64, 74, 95, 96;
NAACP and, 209-12
Antislavery movement: Daniel O’Con¬
nell and, 162,164; history of, 16-17;
Irish-Americans and, 16,164; legacy
of, in Boston, x-xi, 15-16; in Massa¬
chusetts politics, 17; participants in, 19;
women’s suffrage and, 86
Appleton, Nathan, 38
Arkansas: racial violence in, 212
Armstrong, Samuel Chapman, 59

2 5 2

Index

Armstrong, William O., 53
Atlanta Compromise, 57, 58
Atlanta Exposition (1898), 98
Atlanta race riot, 69
Attorneys: Booker T. Washington and,
198; in Boston, 197-202; William
Henry Lewis, 187, 200
Attucks, Crispus, 17,168

Bailey, Alonzo, 194
Baker, Ray Stannard, 7
Baldwin, Louis F., 75
Baldwin, Maria: Archibald Grimke and,
103, 104; black suffrage and, 84, 94;
community service and, 103-4, 106;
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and, 102; as
master of Agassiz school, 38, 103;
NAACP and, 105; W. E. B. Du Bois
on, 103-4; William Monroe Trotter
and, 104; Woman’s Era Club and, 94,
104; women’s suffrage and, 105
Ballou, Richard A., 7
Barrett, William E., 35-36, 51
Bates, Polly Ann, 14
Beatty, Jack, 152
Benjamin, Edgar P., 117,198
Berle, A. A., 116

Birth of a Nation , The (Griffith): Boston
Pilot on, 180-81; Boston press on, 150,
180-81; James Michael Curley and,
148-49,152, 175; lynching and, 148;
NAACP and, 148-52; protest against,
95, 128-29, 148-52; racism in, 147-48;
William Henry Lewis and, 199, 202;
William Monroe Trotter and, 149, 151
Black churches, 129-30, 144, 159
Black Image in the White Mind\ The
(Fredrickson), xii
Black nationalism, 123
Black suffrage (see Disfranchisement;
Voting rights)

Blacks: abolitionists and, 13-14; in Bos¬
ton government, 15; businesses of, 9,
74-76; in Civil War, 14-15; community
institutions of, 12-13; crime and, 11-12;

economic demographics of, 74,183;
economic plight of, 8-9; elections of
1890 and, 50-51; electoral power of, 113;
fear of white violence among, 5-6;
Federal Elections bill and, 30, 36-40,
53-54; in Grand Army of the Republic,
40; housing and, 10-11; Irish-Ameri-
cans and, 162-63, l 75~77> Irish-Yankee
conflict and, 20-21; John Daniels on,

7, 9,10-12, 67-68, 74, 94-95,183; labor
movement and, 181-84; militancy of,

3- 4, 5; national demographics and,

4- 5; political intimidation of, 31-32;
race relations and, 6-7, 39-40, 50-51;
in Republican Party, 31; Roman Cath¬
olic Church and, 177-81; Sam Hose
lynching and, 61-62; Southern mi¬
grants and, 9-10; upper class, 7-8, 59-
61, 99; West Indians and, 10; women,
93-95, 96-98; World War I and, 24-
25,121-22,177

Blackwell, Alice Stone: at 1903 NAWSA
convention, 91; on Booker T. Wash¬
ington, 90; later radicalism of, 83-84,
93; on literacy tests and poll taxes, 92;
white supremacy and, 83; women’s
suffrage and, 86

Blackwell, Henry, 97; abolitionists and,
83; on black disfranchisement, 91-92;
class feeling of, 89; on literacy and
women’s suffrage, 87-88; marriage to
Lucy Stone, 85; on suffrage in Boston,
92-93; white supremacy and, 22, 83;
Womans Journal and, 83, 85
Blair, Henry W., 33
Blair education bill, 33, 48
Blodgett, Geoffrey, 46
Bosfield, Jane R., 145
Boston: African-American women’s
clubs in, 94-95, 96-98; antislavery leg¬
acy in, x-xi, 15-16; black communities
in, 5; Cotton Whigs and, 18; Demo¬
cratic Party in, 173; development of
racism in, 21-22; election of 1890 and,
50-51; immigrants in, 5, 161-62; Irish-

Index 253

Americans in, 8, 162-63; Irish-Yankee
conflict in, 16, 20-21,161-62; race rela¬
tions in, 6-7, 39-40, 50-51; school de¬
segregation in, 13; urban conditions in,
10-12; Women’s Era Club in, 99;
women’s suffrage in, 89, 92-93
Boston Advertiser , 35-36
Boston Brahmins: Federal Elections bill
and, 29-30,31, 42; idealism and, 29; re¬
treat on civil rights and, 47-49
Boston Chronicle, 10
Boston Colored Citizen, 67
Boston Evening Transcript, 47-49, 54,101,
166

Boston Globe: on The Birth of a Nation,
150; on Federal Elections bill, 35, 42-
43, 44-46, 51; retreat on civil rights
and, 54; on William Monroe Trotter,
120,124-25

Boston Guardian, 7; on 1908 election, 113;
black church leaders and, 129; on black
nationalism, 123; on Boston politics,
127; on Faneuil Hall meetings, 127-28;
on Irish nationalism, 123; on NAACP,
117; on National Independent Political
League, 119; on police brutality,

125-26; William Monroe Trotter and,

no, hi, 114, 125-26; on World War I,
122

Boston Herald , 36, 52, 65, no, 125
Boston Journal\ 36, 43-44, 150
Boston Pilot, 172; on The Birth of a Na¬
tion, 180-81; James Jeffrey Roche and,
170; John O’Reilly and, 166; opposition
to abolitionists, 164-65; paternalism

of, 181; William H. O’Connell and,

1 77 , 180
Boston Post, 43

Boston press: on The Birth of a Nation,
150, 180-81; on Federal Elections bill,
35-36, 42-43, 44-46, 47 “ 49 > 5 1
Boston Transcript, 123,125, 150
Brackett, John Quincy Adams, 38, 62
Bradford, George G., 136, 155-57
Breckenridge, William, 170

Brewer, David, 192
Brigham, William, 151
Brimmer, Martin, 46
Brockett, Joshua A., 37
Brooks, Paul C., 38

Brown, Edward Everett, 119, 125,126-27,
198-99

Brown, Henry, 192
Brown, John, 46-47
Brown, Thomas, 171
Brownfield v. South Carolina, 190
Brownsville incident, 24, 70, 72, 200;
Theodore Roosevelt and, 51, 52, 69, 70,
72

Bruce, Dickson D., Jr., 71
Bryan, William Jennings, 99
Buchanan v. Warley, 196, 208-9
Bulkeley, William L., 114
Bumstead, Horace, 136
Bushee, Frederic, 10, 11, 12
Butler, Benjamin F., 15, 38,197-98
Butler, Sigourney, 34

Carney, William, 52, 77
Carrothers, S. L., 119
Carter, Elizabeth, 102
Catt, Carrie Chapman, 91
Chandler, William E., 45
Channing, William Ellery, 17
Chant, Laura Ormiston, 96
Chappelle, Julius C., 30, 37, 38, 39
Charleston Evening Post, 65
Cheney, Ednah D., 86
Chicago Defender, 122
Chip on My Shoulder (Stevens), 60
Civil rights: Alexanders Magazine on, 69;
Boston ward bosses and, 176; Brahmin
retreat on, 47-49, 51-53; Democratic
Party and, 43, 176; Edward Clement
on, 47-49; Henry Grady on, 43-44;
James Jeffrey Roche and, 169-71;

James Michael Curley and, 175; John
O’Reilly and, 168-69; Patrick Maguire
and, 171,172-73; Progressivism and,

133; Republican Party and, 33; Roman

254 Index

Civil rights ( cont .)

Catholic Church and, 177-81; William
Howard Taft and, 69, 72; women’s suf¬
frage and, 89, 91

Civil War: Massachusetts blacks in, 14-15
Clansman , The (Dixon), 147
Clapp, W. W., 36
Clark, Albert, 41

Clement, Edward Henry, 47-49, 54, 68

Cleveland, Grover, 24

Clifford, J. R., 119

Cobleigh, Rolfe, 139,150,151

Cole, J. Will, 67

Coleman, Harold W., 147

Collins, Patrick, 173

Colored American Magazine , 7, 62-67,

100

Colored National League, 38
Colored Patriots of the Revolution (Nell),
13

Colored Women’s League, 96

Common Law , The (Holmes), 187, 189

Conway, Katherine, 178, 180

Corrigan v. Buckley , 209

Cotton Whigs, 18

Courtney, Samuel F., 75

Crafts, Ellen, 14

Crafts, William, 14

Crane, Winthrop Murray, 114, 126

Crawford, George W., 114

Crime, n-12

Crisis , 118,134

Crothers, Samuel M., 61

Crummell, Alexander, 37, 97

Crumpacker, Edgar D., 174

Cummings, Edward, no

Cuney, Maud, 50

Curley, James Michael, 20, 21,173; The
Birth of a Nation and, 148-49,152,175
Curtis, Benjamin, 35

D’Alessandro, Dominic, 181
Daniels, John: on African-American
women’s club movement, 94-95; at
Alexanders Magazine y 67-68; on black

economic demographics, 74, 183; on
Boston’s urban conditions, 10-12; In
Freedom's Birthplace and, 183; on race
relations, 7; on southern migrants, 9
Davidson, Olivia A., 59
Davis, Jefferson, 7
Debt law, 194-95

Democratic party: in Boston, 173; civil
rights and, 43,176; election of 1890
and, 50; Federal Elections bill and,
42-43; John O’Reilly and, 167; racism
in, 176

Disfranchisement (see also Voting rights);
in Alabama, 191-92; Booker T. Wash¬
ington and, 79,191; Henry Blackwell
on, 91-92; of southern blacks, 25; Su¬
preme Court on, 191-92; in Texas,
196-97; William Lloyd Garrison II
on, 92

Dixon, Thomas, 147,151
Douglass, Frederick, 13, 18,19, 36, 40, 88
Downing, George T., 40, 116
Du Bois, W. E. B.: Alexanders Magazine
on, 68, 70; Booker T. Washington
and, 79-80, 81, 98; on Maria Baldwin,
103-4; NAACP and, 134,153-54; Souls
of Black Folk , ix, 66, 68; on voting
rights, 51; William Monroe Trotter
and, hi, 113-16,151-52
Dukes, Nelson, 147
Dunbar, Paul Lawrence, 61
Dupree, William H., 15, 37, 53, 63
Dutton, Henry Worthington, 47
Dyer, Leonidas C., 210-11
Dyer antilynching bill, 210-11

Education (see also Literacy); blacks in
Boston and, n; Blair bill and, 33, 38
Eliot, Charles W., 46, 61, 76, 77
Emilio, Luis F., 14-15
Everett, Edward, 18
Everett, William, 49

Fairlie, John A., no
Faneuil Hall, 6, 38,115, 127-28

Index

255

Federal Elections bill: blacks and, 30, 36-
4°, 53-54; Boston Brahmins and, 29-
30, 31, 42; Boston press on, 35-36,
42-43, 44-46, 47-49, 51,172; business
interests and, 41; consequences of de¬
feat of, 30, 42,53-54; Democratic Party
and, 42-43; Edwin G. Walker and, 30,
37, 38; estimated cost of, 45; Four¬
teenth Amendment and, 33, 34;
George Frisbie Hoar and, 41-42;
Henry Cabot Lodge and, 29-30, 33-
34, 35, 42, 45; House passage of, 36;
James Jeffrey Roche and, 170; John
O’Reilly and, 168-69; in Massachu¬
setts politics, 29-30; Mugwumps and,
42-43; in national politics, 30; origin
of, 33; Republican Party and, 33, 34-35;
southern election fraud and, 31-32,
34-35; southern opposition to, 35,
41-42; William Eustis Russell and,
44-45

Fenians, 165, 166
Ferris, William H., 201
Fifteenth Amendment: voting rights
and, 207

Fifth Amendment: antilynching cam¬
paigns and, 211
Fleischer, Charles, 150
Foraker, Joseph B., 70, 72
Forbes, George W., 111,114
Fortune, Harper S., 62
Fortune, Timothy Thomas, 36-37, 51, 70,
97

Foss, Eugene, 116
Foster, Frank, 182,183
Fourteenth Amendment: Federal Elec¬
tions bill and, 33, 34; literacy require¬
ments and, 207; racial violence and,
210, 212

Fox, Stephen R., 111, 112, 144
Frank, Leo, 26,193-94
Fredrickson, George M., xii
Free Soil Party, 40-41

Gardner, Anna, 88, 89

Garrison, Francis Jackson: Booker T.

Washington and, 78-81,125; intermar¬
riage legislation and, 145-46; in
NAACP, 19,136,139; racial paternal¬
ism and, 156-57; on Theodore Roose¬
velt, 143; William Monroe Trotter and,
128

Garrison, William Lloyd, 16, 18, 128
Garrison, William Lloyd II: African-
American woman’s club movement
and, 97; on black disfranchisement, 92;
on Booker T. Washington, 77^78; on
Henry Grady, 37^38; on literacy and
suffrage, 88-89; women’s suffrage and,
19

Garvey, Marcus, 135
Gatewood, Willard B., 7, 60
General Federation of Women’s Clubs,
100-102

Gibbons, James Cardinal, 178,179
Gilded Age: racism in, 22-24
Giles v. Harris , 191-92
Grady, Henry W., 37, 43-44
Grand Army of the Republic, 39-40
Griffith, David Wark, 147
Grimke, Archibald: at Alexanders Maga¬
zine, 67, 71-72; as attorney, 198; Booker
T. Washington and, 71; on Browns¬
ville incident, 72; leadership of
NAACP and, 153-54; Maria Baldwin
and, 103,104; on Niagara movement,
72; in political office, 15; on Theodore
Roosevelt, 70; William Monroe Trot¬
ter and, 71

Guild, Curtis, 35,114,116
Guinn v. Oklahoma , 207
Gunner, Byron, 115, 119

Hallowell, Norwood P., 14, 38,189
Hallowell, Richard P., 38, 65,125
Harlan, John Marshall, 192,194,197
Harlan, Louis, 57-58, 73, 76, 79
Harris, Charles E., 38
Harris, Gilbert, 75
Harrison, Benjamin, 32-33
Hart, Albert Bushnell, 35, 77, no

256 Index

Hart, Thomas, 38
Harvard University, 77
Hayden, Lewis, 14, 168
Hayes, James, 115
Hemenway, Mary, 59
Higginson, Henry Lee, 46, 59
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 19; as
abolitionist leader, 22; Booker T.
Washington and, 61-62; civil rights
and, 46-47, 53; Mugwumps and, 30, 43
Hill, Adelaide Cromwell, 7, 60
Hill, Johnson W., 129
Hilton, Joan, 13
Hixson, William B., Jr., 205
Hoar, George Frisbie: civil rights and,
52-53; election of 1890 and, 50; Federal
Elections bill and, 29-30, 41-42; life
and career of, 40-41
Hoar, Sherman, 49
Hofstadter, Richard, 76
Holloran, Peter, 10, n
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 22; Booker T.
Washington and, 188; Civil War expe¬
rience of, 188-89; The Common Law
and, 187,189; on grand jury composi¬
tion, 190-91; judicial conservatism of,
189-90; on lynching, 192-94; on mob
violence, 211; on peonage, 194-95; on
segregation, 195-96; silence of on
blacks, 187,188-89; Supreme Court
opinions of, 190-97, 211; on voting
rights, 191-92,196-97
Hopkins, Pauline, 63,100, 118
Hose, Sam, 26, 61
Housing, io-ii
Howe, Julia Ward, 85, 86
Hub , 136

Hughes, Charles Evans, 193,194,195-96,

l 97

Hunter, M. F., 66
Hutchins, Basil F., 75

Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement ,
The (Kraditor), 86

Immigrants (see also Irish-Americans); in
Boston, 5; racism and, 21-22

Immigration Restriction League, 21
In Freedom's Birthplace (Daniels), 183
Independents (see Mugwumps)
Intermarriage: NAACP and, 145-46
Irish nationalism, 165
Irish-Americans: antislavery movement
and, 16, 164; blacks and, 20,162-63,

1:75—77; economic opportunity and, 8;
effects of World War I on, 177; immi¬
gration of, 162-63; Idsh national
struggle and, 165; Irish-Yankee conflict
and, 16, 20-21,161-62; racist senti¬
ments of, 164-65; William Monroe
Trotter and, 123,163

Jack, John W., 96-97
Jackson, Charles Cabot, 46
James, William, 46, 61, 77
Jeffries, Jim, 6
Johnson, Ed, 192-93
Johnson, Jack, 6

Johnson, James Weldon, 55,154, 211

Johnson, John, 146

Jury: composition, 190-91

Kearney, Belle, 91

Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 20; appoint¬
ment of Edward E. Brown, 174, 199;
black aspirations and, 173-75; Republic
and, 173, 177; William Monroe Trotter
and, 126-27, l 73 > l 74~75
Klugh, David S., 159
Kraditor, Aileen S., 86, 87
Ku Klux Klan, 196

Labor Leader , 182,183
Labor market, 8-9
Labor movement, 122,181-84
Lamar, Joseph Rucker, 193
Lane, William C., 73
Lawrence, Abott, 18
Lawrence, Amos, 18
League of Women for Community Ser¬
vice, 105
Lee, Henry, 46

Index 257

Lee, Joseph, 75

Legislation (see also Federal Elections
bill); Blair education bill, 33, 48; on
discrimination, 199; Dyer antilynching
bill, 210-11; on intermarriage, 145-46
Lenox, John M., 15
Lewis, John H., 74-75
Lewis, William Henry, 15, 61,187,
199-202
Liberator , 13

Literacy: suffrage and, 25, 87-89, 92, 207
Livermore, Mary A., 86
Living is Easy y The (West), 60
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 53; early career of,
32; election of 1890 and, 49-50; Fed¬
eral Elections bill and, 29, 30, 33-34,
35, 42, 45; immigration restriction and,
21-22; intermarriage legislation and,
145; Moorheld Storey and, 203; racial
attitudes of, 51-52; supporters of, 35
Loud, Joseph Prince, 136, 139,153
Lovejoy, Elijah, 115
Lowe, Rebecca, 101
Lynching (see also Antilynching cam¬
paigns); The Birth of a Nation and, 148;
Colored American Magazine on, 64-65;
of Leo Frank, 26,193-94; in Memphis,
74; Moorfield Storey on, 140-41; of
Sam Hose, 26, 61-62, 64, 78; in South,
26; Supreme Court on, 192-94; Theo¬
dore Roosevelt on, 70; Womans Era
on, 96

Maguire, Patrick J., 171-73,177
Marshall, Louis, 209
Massachusetts: abolitionists in, 12, 18,
19-20; antislavery movement in, 17;
black demographics in, 4-5; Civil War
and, 14-15; Federal Elections bill and,
29-30; race relations in, 6-7; women’s
suffrage in, 93

Massachusetts Citizens’ Equal Rights
Association, 38
Mather, Cotton, 16

McCabe v. Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe,
195-96

McCarthy, Frank H., 182
McCormack, Thomas J., 179
McKinley, William, 24, 61
McNeill, George E., 182
McPherson, James, ix-x, 76
Meier, August, 58, 73
Memphis: lynching and, 74
Messenger, 122
Miller, Kelly, 66, 67
Miner, A. A., 37

Miscegenation (see Intermarriage)
Mitchell, Charles L., 15
Moffatt, Adelene, 139
Montgomery Race Conference, 65-66,

7 ** “79

Moody, Dwight, 96
Moon, The, 68
Moore, Fred R., 63
Moore v. Dempsey, 194, 211-12
Morgan, Clement: as attorney, 198; in
NAACP, 117,136,138-39,154; William
Monroe Trotter and, 114
Morris, Charles S., 114
Morris, Emery T., 117, 118,198
Morris, Robert, 179, 197-98
Mugwumps, 21, 30, 35, 42-43. 46
Murphy, Edgar Gardner, 66, 78

NAACP (see National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People)
National Afro-American League, 37
National American Woman Suffrage
Association, 86, 88, 91,102-3
National Association for the Advance¬
ment of Colored People: 1911 confer¬
ence, 139-40; Albert Pillsbury and,

119, 136,138; antilynching campaign
and, 209-12; biracial composition of,
I 33”34*> Birth of a Nation and,

148-52; black churches and, 144,159;
black extradition and, 146; black lead¬
ership of, 153-54; black membership,
135, *57. 1 5^“59J Booker T. Washington

258 Index

National Association for the Advance¬
ment of Colored People (cont.)
and, 80, 81,134; Butler Wilson and,
1:36—37,144,147,153-54; Clement Mor¬
gan and, 136,138-39,154; compared to
other organizations, 134-35; conserva¬
tive tactics of, 118; federal segregation
and, 143-44; founding and early devel¬
opment of, 133-34,135; Francis Jackson
Garrison and, 136,139; intermarriage
legislation and, 145-46; Josephine St.
Pierre Ruffin and, 157; Lincoln legacy
and, 142; Mary Evans Wilson and,
3:36—37, 158; Moorfield Storey and, 19,
136,137-38, 202-3, 206-12; National
Independent Political League and, 119;
national influence of, 135, 136; on prej¬
udice in community institutions, 140,
144; racial composition of, 152,154-57;
racial paternalism in, 156-57; on racial
violence, 135; on racism in American
Bar Association, 141-42; on racism in
army, 146-47; on segregation, 196,
208-9; social agencies of, 144-45; stra "
tegic concepts of, 134; on voting rights,
207-8; Wendell Phillips centennial
and, 140-41; white leadership in,
335-36; William Monroe Trotter and,
116,117-18,134-35; withdrawal of
school songbook and, 145

National Association of Colored
Women, 98,100

National Equal Rights League, 121,122

National Federation of Afro-American
Women, 97-98

National Independent Equal Rights
League, 120-21

National Independent Political League,
118-20

National Negro Business League, 8,12,
75-76

National Woman’s Suffrage Association,
85

NAWSA (see National American
Woman Suffrage Association)

Negro Thought in America (Meier), 58
Negro-American Political League, 115-16
Nell, William Cooper, 13
Neo-abolitionists: abolitionist legacy
and, 19; Booker T. Washington and,
77—81; William Monroe Trotter and,
125

Nerney, May Childs, 148, 153, 154
New England Conservatory, 50
New York Age, 36, 37, 38, 40, 53, 71,122
New York Sun , 65
Niagara movement, 68, 72, 113—15
Nixon v. Herndon , 196-97, 208
Norton, Charles Eliot, 46

O’Brien, Hugh, 29, 38
O’Connell, Daniel, 16,162,163-64
O’Connell, William H., 177,180-81
Oklahoma: voting fraud in, 196
O’Reilly, John Boyle: civil rights and,
168-69; Daniel O’Connell and, 163,
166; empathy for black struggle, 20,

167- 68,170; Federal Elections bill and,

168- 69; as Irish revolutionary, 165-66;
labor movement and, 182; Roman
Catholic Church and, 177; working
class radicalism and, 166-67

O’Sullivan, John F., 182
Otis, Harrison Gray, 18
OToole, James, 180
Ovington, Mary White, 115,148-49
Owen, Chandler, 122

Paris peace conference (1919), 122-23
Park, Robert, 59
Peabody, Francis, no
Peabody, Philip G., 209
Peonage, 194-95

Phillips, Wendell, 14,16,18, 84, 86,142,
166

Phillips Exeter Academy, 51
Pierce, Edward L., 40
Pillsbury, Albert E., 19, 62, 136,138,
141-42

Pindell, Geraldine, no

Index

259

Pleck, Elizabeth, 8-9, 9-10

Plessy v. Ferguson, 26,188

Police brutality, 125-26

Poll tax, 25, 92

Potter, George, 164

Poverty: blacks in Boston and, n

Price, J. C., 37

Progressive Era: racism in, 24
Progressivism: civil rights and, 133
Puller, Aaron, 159
Puritans: slavery and, 16

Quincy, Josiah, 173

Racial violence (see also Lynching); in
Arkansas, 212; Booker T. Washington
on, 64; in Boston, 5-6; Fifth Amend¬
ment and, 211; Fourteenth Amend¬
ment and, 210, 212; James Jeffrey
Roche on, 170-71; NAACP on, 135; in
South Carolina, 168; Supreme Court
on, 211-12

Racism: American Bar Association and,
141-42, 200-201; in The Birth of a Na¬
tion, 147-48; Colored American Maga¬
zine on, 64; Democratic Party and,
176; failure of presidential leadership
and, 23-24; George Bradford on, 155;
in Gilded Age, 22-24; Irish-Ameri-
cans and, 164-65; in Progressive Era,
24; southern, 25-26; toward immi¬
grants, 21-22; in U.S. Army, 146-47; in
U.S. government, 142-44; women’s
suffrage and, 83, 85-86, 91; during
World War I, 24-25
Randolph, A. Philip, 122
Randolph, Peter, 10

Ransom, Reverdy C., 67, 68,116, 129-30
Reed, Thomas, 32, 45
Republic, 171, 172, 173, 177
Republican Party: antislavery movement
in, 17; blacks in, 31; civil rights and, 33;
effect of southern voting fraud on,
31-32; election of 1890 and, 50; Federal

Elections bill and, 33, 34-35; southern
strategy of, 31, 32-33
Robbins, Benjamin C., 18
Roche, James Jeffrey, 169-71, 179
Rock, John Swett, 197
Rogers v. Alabama, 190-91
Roman Catholic Church, 177-81
Roosevelt, Theodore: Booker T. Wash¬
ington and, 24, 70, 90; Brownsville in¬
cident and, 51, 52, 69, 70, 72; on
lynching, 70
Root, Elihu, 65
Ruffin, George L., 15, 95,198
Ruffin, Josephine St. Pierre: African-
American women’s club movement
and, 94, 95; black suffrage and, 84, 94,
95; Boston politics and, 98; founding
of schools by, 102; General Federation
of Women’s Clubs and, 100-101; Ida
B. Wells and, 96, 100; later career of,
102; NAACP and, 157; on race rela¬
tions in Boston, 6; upper class values
of, 99; white suffragists and, 99-100;
Women’s Era Club and, 12, 19, 94
Ruffner, Viola Knapp, 59
Russell, William Eustis, 30, 42, 44-45,

53> i7 6

Sanborn, Frank, 67, 119
Scott, Emmett J., 121-22,147
Scott, William H., 111, 115,129
Segregation: NAACP and, 196, 208-9;
in South, 25-26; Supreme Court on,
188, 208-9
Sewall, Samuel, 16
Shaler, Nathaniel Southgate, 61, 77
Shaw, Lemuel, 18
Shaw, Matthew Arnold, 118,129
Shea, Cornelius, 182
Shillady, John, 156
Shipp, 192-93
Simpson, M. Cravath, 118
Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, 180,181
Slavery (see also Antislavery movement);
abolition of in Massachusetts, 12;

260 Index

Slavery ( cont .)

American Revolution and, 16-17; P u "
ritans and, 16
Small, Eliza, 14
Smith, Peter J., 67, 75
Smock, Raymond L., 58
Soga, Kirland A., 66, 67
Souls of Black Folk. , (Du Bois), ix, 66,

68

South: black disfranchisement in, 25;
Federal Elections bill and, 35, 41-42;
lynching in, 26, 74; racism in, 25-26,
155; voting fraud in, 31-32,34-35; wom¬
en’s suffrage in, 86, 87
South Carolina: racial violence in, 168;

voting fraud in, 34
Southern migrants: in Boston, 9-10
Spingarn, Joel, 153,154, 210, 211
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 85, 88-89
Stearns, George, 59
Stevens, Walter J., 60
Stone, Lucy: abolitionists and, 18, 83,
84-85; American Women’s Suffrage
Association and, 85; class feeling of,
89; Colored Women’s League, 96;
white supremacy and, 22, 83; Woman’s
Era Club and, 99; women’s rights and,
84-85

Storey, Charles, 203

Storey, Moorfield: abolitionists and, 203;
anti-imperialism and, 205; anti¬
lynching campaign and, 209-12; Bos¬
ton politics and, 204-5; Charles
Sumner and, 202, 203-4; civil rights
advocacy, 187, 205; early attitudes on
race, 204; legal conservatism of, 207;
on lynching, 140-41; on mob violence,
211-12; Mugwumps and, 21, 46;
NAACP and, 19,136,137-38,140,156,
202-3, 206-12; on residential segrega¬
tion, 196, 208-9; on voting rights,
2oy~S\ William Monroe Trotter and,
128, 206; on Woodrow Wilson, 143
Street, Gordon J., 37, 51
Suffrage ( see Disfranchisement; Voting
rights; Women’s suffrage)

Sumner, Charles, 16; centennial celebra¬
tion, 116; Henry Cabot Lodge and, 22,
32; Moorfield Storey and, 202, 203-4
Supreme Court: on grand jury composi¬
tion, 190-91; on lynching, 192-94; on
mob violence, 211-12; on peonage,
x 94“95*> on segregation, 188,195-96,
208-9; on voting rights, 191-92, 196-
97, 207

Taft, William Howard, 24, 69, 72
Taney, Roger Brooke, 180-81
Taylor, Susie King, 6-7
Terrell, Mary Church, 96, 98
Texas: disfranchisement in, 196-97
Thernstrom, Stephan, 8
Thrasher, Max B., 59
Tobin, Daniel, 182-83
Toomey, David J., 180
Tourgee, Albion W., 34-35
Transcendentalism, 17
Trotter, James Monroe, 14,15, 19, 109-10
Trotter, William Monroe: abolitionists
and, m-12; activism of, 117; Alexanders
Magazine on, 68; The Birth of a Nation
and, 149,151; black church leaders and,
129-30; black nationalism and, 123;
Booker T. Washington and, 58, 66, 80,
121, 124-25; Boston Guardian and, no,
in, 114, 125-26; Boston politics and,
126-27; community leadership of,
128-29; death of, 130; disruption of Ni¬
agara movement by, 113-15; early ca¬
reer, 109-11; Faneuil Hall meetings
and, 127^-28; Irish-Americans and, 123,
163; John F. Kennedy and, 173,174-75;
labor movement and, 122; later career,
121,130; Maria Baldwin and, 104;
Moorfield Storey and, 128, 206;
NAACP and, 116,117-18,134-35; Na¬
tional Independent Equal Rights
League and, 120-21; National Inde¬
pendent Political League and, 118,
119-20; National Negro Business
League and, 73; in national politics,

Index 261

112- 13; Negro-American Political
League and, 115-16; neo-abolitionists
and, 125; Paris peace conference and,
122-23; personality of, 112, 116-17; on
police brutality, 126; on power of black
vote, 21, 113; on race relations in Bos¬
ton, 7; W. E. B. Du Bois and, in,

113- 16; William Henry Lewis and, 199,
200; William Lloyd Garrison centen¬
nial and, 128; Woodrow Wilson and,
120, 143, 144; World War I and, 122

Tuberculosis, 10

Unitarianism, 17

United States: federal segregation,
142-44; as white supremacist power, 23
United States Army: racism in, 146-47
Up From Slavery (Washington), 59
US. v. Broughton , 195
U.S. v. Mosley , 196
U.S. v. Reynolds , 195

Vardaman, James K., 91
Vesey, Denmark, 71

Villard, Oswald Garrison, 79-81,133,136,
H3

Voting fraud: Federal Elections bill and,
31-32, 34-35; in Oklahoma, 196; in
South Carolina, 34

Voting rights (see also Disfranchisement;
Women’s suffrage); Booker T. Wash¬
ington and, 65; Fifteenth Amend¬
ment, 207; Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin
and, 84, 94, 95; linkage to literacy, 87^
89, 92, 207; Maria Baldwin and, 84, 94;
NAACP and, 207-8; Oliver Wendell
Holmes and, 191-92,196-97; press on,
65; Supreme Court on, 191-92,196-97,
207

Waldron, J. Milton, 115,119
Walker, David, 13

Walker, Edwin G.: as attorney, 197-98;
career of, 39; in elected office, 15, 198;
Federal Elections bill and, 30, 37, 38;

on Irish national struggle, 67-68; Na¬
tional Afro-American League, 37
Walker, Quock, 12
Walker, Walter F., 67
Wallace, Walter W., 62
Walsh, David I., 149,152
Walsh, Francis R., 164
Walter, Lynde Minshull, 47
Walters, Alexander, 115-16,118, 119
Ward bosses: civil rights and, 176
Washington, Booker T.: 1908 election
and, 72; accommodationism of, 57-58;
Afro-American Council and, 60; Ala¬
bama debt law and, 194-95; Alexanders
Magazine and, 67-73; Atlanta Com¬
promise and, 57, 58; on Atlanta race
riot, 69; black attorneys and, 198-99;
black Boston and, 58-59; Charles Eliot
and, 76, 77; Colored American Maga¬
zine and, 62-67; compared to
NAACP, 134; control of black press
and, 79-80; Francis Jackson Garrison
and, 78-81, 125; James Jeffrey Roche
and, 171; Montgomery Race Confer¬
ence and, 66, 78-79; mysterious behav¬
ior of, 139-40; NAACP and, 80, 81,
134; National Negro Business League
and, 12; neo-abolitionists and, 77-81;
nonpolitical attitude of, 59-60; Oliver
Wendell Holmes and, 188; Oswald
Garrison Villard and, 79-81; on racial
violence, 64; Sam Hose lynching and,
61-62, 64, 78; Theodore Roosevelt
and, 24, 70, 90; on voting rights, 65,
79,191; W. E. B. Du Bois and, 79-80,
81, 98; white support in Boston, 61,
76-81; William Henry Lewis and, 200,
201; William Monroe Trotter and, 66,
80, 121,124-25

Washington, Margaret Murray, 98, 99
Watkins, Jesse W., 62
Webster, Daniel, 18
Weld, Theodore Dwight, 17
Wells, Ida B.: antilynching campaign of,
26, 64, 74, 95, 96; Josephine St. Pierre
Ruffin and, 100; William Monroe
Trotter and, 112, 118

262 Index

Wendell, Barrett, 61
Wendell Phillips Club, 61
West, Dorothy, 60
West Indians: in Boston, 10
Whaley, A. W., 119

White supremacy: in Gilded Age, 23; in
Progressive Era, 24; women’s suffrage
and, 22, 83, 86, 87
Whittier, John Greenleaf, 126
Wickersham, George W., 201
Wilkins, Fred (“Shadrach”), 14
Willard, Francis, 96
Williams, George Fred, 49,176
Williams, John J., 178, 179
Williams v. Mississippi 25
Wilson, Butler, 128; army racism and,
147; as attorney, 117,198; NAACP and,

1 36-37, r 44> 147) I 53“54
Wilson, Mary Evans, 136-37,158
Wilson, Woodrow, 24; federal segrega¬
tion and, 142-44; William Monroe
Trotter and, 120
Winthrop, John, 3
Winthrop, Robert C., 18
WolfCJames H., 6, 14, 198-99

Woman's Era, 96, 97, 98, 99-100, 102
Woman’s Era Club, 12, 19, 94, 99, 104
Womans Journal: abolitionist tradition
and, 89-90; closing of, 93; Henry
Blackwell and, 83, 85; NAWSA and,
86, 91; on southern race relations,
90-91; on white supremacy, 87
Women’s suffrage: antislavery movement
and, 86; black women and, 84, 93-94;
civil rights and, 89, 91; Josephine St.
Pierre Ruffin on, 99-100; linkage to
literacy, 87-89; Maria Baldwin and,
105; in Massachusetts, 93; national as¬
sociations, 85, 86; Pauline Hopkins on,
100; racism and, 83, 85-86, 91; social
class and, 89; white supremacy and, 22,
83, 86, 87; whiteness of, 86-87; Wil¬
liam Lloyd Garrison II and, 19; Wom¬
ans Era on, 99-100
World War I: black support of, 121-22;
effects on blacks, 177; effects on Irish-
Americans, 177; racism during, 24-25

YMCA, 144

Zueblein, Charles, 116

FROM THE 1997 PUBLICATION:

Boston, the headquarters of radical abolition during
the antebellum period, is, paradoxically, often thought
of as unfriendly to African-Americans today. In this
study of the city’s significant role in the fight against
racism between 1890 and 1920, Mark Robert
Schneider illuminates the vital links between Boston’s
antislavery tradition, race reform at the turn of the
century, and the modern civil rights movement.

This open access digital edition produced by the
Northeastern University Library with the generous support
of the Humanities Open Book Program,
funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and
the National Endowment for the Humanities

THE

AN DREW W.

MELLON

FOUNDATION

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N Northeastern University

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